project

01/06/2015 – 03/10/2018

Barabasi Lab

In collaboration with Stephen Kosack, Michele Coscia, Evann Smith, Albert-László Barabási, Ricardo Hausmann

Government Structure

The online footprints of modern governments open a new window to understanding them. Governments in modern societies undertake an array of complex functions that shape politics and economics, individual and group behavior, and the natural, social, and built environment. How are governments structured to execute these diverse responsibilities? How do those structures vary, and what explains the similarities? To examine these longstanding questions, we develop a technique for mapping Internet "footprint" of government with network science methods. We use this approach to describe and analyze the diversity in functional scale and structure among the 50 state governments reflected in the webpages and links they have created online: 32.5 million webpages of and 110 million hyperlinks among 47,631 agencies.