How Congress is Connected: The Diffusion of Web Technology Practices Through Congressional State Delegations.

Our objective in this paper is to establish the relevance of informal networks in the diffusion of innovations among members of the U.S. House of Representatives. We do this through a cross sectional analysis of the variation of the quality of members' official Internet home pages, focusing in particular on the timeliness of the information each site makes available. We take timeliness as a good proxy for each office's organizational attention to using this form of communication technology. In this paper, we test for the diffusion of this attention to websites through communication among congressional state delegations. That is, we test whether a member is more (less) likely to attend to her website if others in her state delegation also are more (less) attentive. The inferential challenge in any spatial diffusion study is to distinguish between a spatial diffusion process from effects that merely result from spatial heterogeneity, or unmeasured confounding variables that are spatially correlated with the patterns of communication. We use nonlinear conditional autoregressive models to test for the presence of spatial heterogeneity by making use of district adjacency data, and exploit the (partially) ignorable state boundaries that separate some adjacent districts into different states to distinguish between diffusion and heterogeneity. Using this estimation strategy, and holding constant other determinants of website quality, we find that attention to websites is strongly driven by communication within state delegations, and especially so among co-partisans within states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]