Political Network Analysis Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political networks are defined as all those networks that are politically relevant. Networks are specific types of relations (e.g., communication, support, influence, command and control, self-organization, persuasion, coalition, trade flows) between actors—individual, collective, corporate, private, public—and between actors and objects (e.g. issues, court sentences, committees, candidates, events), and between objects (e.g. semantic networks, cognitive maps). Politically relevant means that the contents of these relations refer to collectively binding decisions—be it in the preor post decision phase. Hierarchies, markets, as well as any other governance form of self-organization can be conceived as networks. The analytical divide is, therefore, not between hierarchies and networks, but between different network structures representing politico administrative hierarchy and self-organizing networks.

Public network analysis (PNA) accentuates the interdependent nature of individual expectations and choices—instead of assuming atomistic actors. Instead of reifying macro phenomena, it traces the microfoundations of their often unintended emergence. Thus, PNA focuses on the structure and dynamics of networks of individual actors (so-called ego-centered networks), of whole systems, as well as of subgroups within systems.

Evolution Of Political Network Analysis In Political Science

For years, sociology and graph theory nearly exclusively provided a constant inflow of network concepts to be applied in political science. Most of the early work remained descriptive—such as centralities, subgroups, or connectivity—rather than hypothesis testing, which entails networks as dependent and independent variables, respectively. Since the 1990s, several new trends cross-fertilized network analysis in political science. Some of these trends include theoretical progress in physics and informatics, availability of analytical statistical procedures and respective software packages, and availability of large-scale data sets. PNA is meanwhile an acknowledged original pacemaker in applied network analysis. New questions include: how do multiple networks (e.g., trade or organizational membership) interact and coevolve? How do networks emerge as the result of stochastic individual choices? Which impact does the specific structure of networks have on diverse dependent variables (e.g., individual choices, organizational performance, international conflict)?

In his 1955 dissertation, Peter M. Blau, one of the forgotten pioneers in PNA, recorded the informal pattern of collaboration and communication in two government agencies. This type of network analyses of public administrations is a precursor to quantitative, partly large-scale comparative studies on the structure and performance of administrations, relating them to formal and informal organizational features.

In retrospect, electoral research, community studies, and international relations (IR) applications proved to have the most extensive impact on the development of PNA. Inspired by the group approach of the Columbia school of electoral research, Robert Huckfeldt and collaborators translated its implicit research program into a veritable network approach to voting behavior. In their famous 1995 South Bend study, Huckfeldt and John Sprague were able to determine the impact of discussion networks on voter turnout and voters’ choices. Their main research questions still continue to inspire current investigations, for example, under which communication structures persuasion is effective, and why preferential disagreement and opinion diversity persistently occur. More recently, the increasing complexity of these research questions (i.e., varying heterogeneity of environments, varying credibility of discussants, varying network structures) led to new designs requiring the application of laboratory experiments and agent-based simulations.

The other influential stream of research has been community power and community influence studies. One of the most prominent studies was Edward Laumann and Franz Pappi’s 1976 analysis of community decision making in a small German town. The study detected closed subgroups, such as cliques, that were considered able to act collectively.

This type of local policy studies successively extended to the national and the international level, inducing a series of theoretically, as well as methodically, more elaborated quantitative policy case studies. Edward Laumann and David Knoke’s 1987 pathbreaking study on the U.S. energy and health policy in the Carter era during the late 1970s took into account the whole set of relevant organizations in order to detect the differing structures of so-called policy domains. Thus, PNA allows context-specific fluidities and dynamics of policy making and precludes popular reifications.

Analytical questions focused on the comparative causal impact of factors like relative interest, with regard to issues versus network position for involvement and mobilization effectiveness of the organizations. Identification of central groups, the specific structure of conflict, the detection of differently institutionalized coordination patterns, and the explanation of outcomes are only few of the many targeted research objectives. Meanwhile, availability of process-produced data led to ingenious and sometimes spectacular new perspectives. In this respect, James Fowler conducted one of the most stimulating analyses in 2006. Fowler investigated the whole cosponsor network of legislative proposals in U.S. Congress for the period from 1973 to 2004. Thus, it is possible not only to depict the most influential legislator, but also cross-validate the impact of the connectivity of the resulting network on roll call choice.

For the area of international relations, in the 1960s Steven J. Brams had already proposed to take the prominent system concept seriously, and to operationalize it via PNA. In his sophisticated 1966 study, he investigated three different kinds of transaction flows: diplomatic exchanges, trade, and shared memberships in intergovernmental organizations. Numerous follow-ups in the next two decades tried to identify the block structure of international trade in order to detect dependency structures and sources of international inequality. Only more recent studies used the emerging international network structures as the independent and dependent variable, respectively (e.g., in order to explain the formation of trans governmental networks or to predict militarized interstate conflict). Meanwhile, IR seems to be the most dynamic sector in inventing new research questions related to issues such as terrorism and counterterrorism, proliferation, alliances, and fungibility of different sources of power and designs.

Bibliography:

Brams, Steven J. “Transaction Flows in the International System.” American Political Science Review 60, no. 4 (1966): 880–898.
Fowler, James H. “Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks.” Political Analysis 14, no. 4 (2006): 456–487.
Hafner-Burton, Emilie, Miles Kahler, and Alexander H. Montgomery. “International Organization Network Analysis for International Relations.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63 (forthcoming).
Huckfeldt, Robert. “Information, Persuasion, and Political Communication.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, edited by Russel J. Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, 100–123. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Huckfeldt, Robert, and John Sprague. Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Kahler, Miles, ed. Networked Politics: Agency, Power, and Governance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Knoke, David. Political Networks: The Structural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Laumann, Edward O., and Franz U. Pappi. Networks of Collective Action: A Perspective on Community Influence Systems. New York: Academic Press, 1976.
Laumann, Edward O., and David Knoke. The Organizational State: Social Choice in National Policy Domains. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Zeev Maoz. Networks of Nations:The Evolution, Structure, and Impact of International Networks, 1816–2001. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. O’Toole, Laurence J., Jr., and Kenneth J. Meier. “Modeling the Impact of Public Management: The Implications of Structural Context.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 9, no. 4 (1999): 505–526.
Provan, Keith G., and H. Brinton Milward. “A Preliminary Theory of Interorganizational Network Effectiveness: A Comparative Study of Four Community Mental Health Systems.” Administrative Science Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1995): 1–33.
Scholz, Jon T., and Cheng-Lung Wang. “Cooptation or Transformation? Local Policy Networks and Federal Regulatory Enforcement.” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 1 (2006): 81–97.
Thurner, Paul W., and Martin Binder. “EU Transgovernmental Networks: The Emergence of a New Political Space beyond the Nation State?” European Journal of Political Research 48 (2009): 80–106.
Ward, Michael D., and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch. Spatial Regression Models. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2008.

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