What cosponsorships tell us about North Carolina politics
One of the biggest questions in all of politics, at every level, is who is close with whom.
If you’re an advocate, lobbyist, reporter, or an elected official, knowing the webs of influence in a political body is critical if you’re to advance your agenda. Unfortunately, there is no book where every legislator writes what they think of everyone else that we can read. That is left to guesses, deductions, and gossip.
There is, however, one place when legislators do publicly declare when they agree with each other on specific issues - sponsoring legislation.
Mapping our relationships in the State House
Network analysis is the study of social relations among a set of people by means of graph theory. It has been used to look at everything from Congress to the Seven Kingdoms and can uncover aspects of an institution that would otherwise be too difficult to parse out. We did this for Massachusetts and are now doing it for North Carolina.
You can jump to the data to see the full stats and read more for some takeaways.
How we slice the data
We collected the sponsors and co-sponsors of all bills on the State House’s website as of June 25, 2025. Each time two legislators were on the same legislation, that was treated as a connection between them. We then weighted the connections proportional to how many sponsors the legislation had. A bill with two sponsors was a connection of 0.50 between them. A bill with ten sponsors meant a connection worth 0.10 between all of them. And so on.
We then took this map of connections between legislators and used three measurements to derive some insights:
Centrality: the legislators that appear in the middle of this network closest to others.
Closest pairings: who each legislator co-sponsored the most with.
How you can use the data
If you’re looking to better understand Raleigh and move your policies, here are some ways to look at this data. We want to stress, it’s only one perspective from one dataset, to be supplemented by your own analysis and what you hear.
All else being equal, more central legislators are probably more effective internal advocates for your issue. Obviously, leadership positions and committee membership is hugely important, but you may also want to get your material in front of those who seem to have closer shared interests in the building, if only to market their support.
If you’re looking to connect with a legislator, look at who are their highest cosponsor pairings. If you have only a few legislative champions, this could also provide a map to a committee chair you need. Look at who that chair cosponsors with, then who those people cosponsor with, and so on until you reach someone who supports your bill.
How Legislata can help
Legislata is a new type of policy intelligence platform, with a mix of automated and AI-generated content, like bill tracking and transcripts of public meetings, and the ability for analysts to share and monetize their own insights. We’re still early and are planning out content that could help in North Carolina, so if you have anything you’d like to see or questions to ask, please get in touch at chris@legislata.com.