Political Disagreement causes Government Shutdown
It has been 17 years since the United States’s last shutdown, but we have managed to do it again. Early Tuesday, October 1st, a divided Congress could not come to an agreement on expenditures for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare. As a result, all ‘non-essential’ government programs have been temporarily halted, meaning that “800,000 federal workers will be furloughed” until the shutdown is over. Furthermore, thousands more with federal jobs considered ‘essential,’ such as fire fighters and air-traffic controllers, must continue work without compensation. Nobody seems to know exactly how long and/or severe the shutdown will last, but it has already become an economic issue for numerous American families.
This situation captures an issue that can come up when there is a balanced network of two groups that have antagonistic relations with each other. The cause of this political crisis is delineated in the networks textbook, Chapter 4, ‘Networks in Their Surrounding Contexts’, and Chapter 5, ‘Positive and Negative Relationships.’ In this case, representatives in the Republican Party share positive relations with one other, while everyone in the Democratic Party shares positive relations with one other. Any connections in between the two parties, however, are more likely to be antagonistic, rather than friendly. Chapter 4 goes over homophily, which is “the principle that we tend to be similar to our friends.” The shared similar interest in each of the groups is obvious – the democrats support Obamacare, while the republicans would rather go on without it. Also, the chapter discusses affiliation, where a bipartite graph can be created to sort different objects into categories. The congressmen would fall under two major categories, Republican or Democratic, with very few people listed as an independent. Similarly, they could also be distinguished as either ‘supportive’ or ‘unsupportive’ of ACA.