The Colombian legislative process, 2014-2025: networks, topics, and polarization

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Colombia's legislative process from 2014 to 2025 by examining networks, topics, and polarization, revealing patterns of collaboration, influence, and thematic shifts through a comprehensive relational and semantic approach.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated network and semantic analysis framework to study legislative behavior, polarization, and thematic evolution in Colombia's Congress.

Findings

Identification of co-sponsorship and collaboration patterns

Detection of influential actors and discursive cores

Revealing thematic shifts across administrations

Abstract

The legislative output of Colombia's House of Representatives between 2014 and 2025 is analyzed using 4,083 bills. Bipartite networks are constructed between parties and bills, and between representatives and bills, along with their projections, to characterize co-sponsorship patterns, centrality, and influence, and to assess whether political polarization is reflected in legislative collaboration. In parallel, the content of the initiatives is studied through semantic networks based on co-occurrences extracted from short descriptions, and topics by party and period are identified using a stochastic block model for weighted networks, with additional comparison using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. In addition, a Bayesian sociability model is applied to detect terms with robust connectivity and to summarize discursive cores. Overall, the approach integrates relational and semantic structure to describe thematic shifts across administrations, identify influential actors and collectives, and provide a reproducible synthesis that promotes transparency and citizen oversight of the legislative process.