Complex hypergraph analysis of Australian MPs' professional connections, 1947-2019

Abstract: We propose a suit of methods to analyse the professional networks of MPs, showing how to analyse weak-tie connections between legislators and the connections between background charactersitic attributes. Applied to a novel dataset on the backgrounds of Australian MPs in the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party of Australia (1947-2019), we show that our approach can help to describe and explain the decline in working-class and trade unionist MPs from the Labor Party, the homogeneous elitism of the mid-20 century Liberal Party, and the increasing similarity of both parties' professional networks, occuring in the period of party cartellisation from the 1980s onward. Our paper's finding show that our method has clear potential for broader applications in the study of political representation, diversity, and elite political networks.