Program Abstracts
Isil Akbulut, “ Inter-Organizational Networks: Do They Matter for Peace Operation Outcomes?”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Even though benefits associated with cooperation among inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) in peace missions are well described, and factors that might determine the formation and evolution of inter-organizational cooperation have been studied in the literature, there has been very little empirical attention on how IGOs collaborate within a network context in peace missions and how these collaboration networks might account for the success/failure of peace operation processes. I argue, consistent with the extant literature, centralized and closed IGO networks—whether formally structured through time or ad hoc in each conflict—will improve and facilitate coordination in peace operations and achieve a more coherent IGO presence. They, therefore, will be more effective in accomplishing complex tasks in peace operation processes, e.g., disarmament, demobilization, and institution building. Other findings concentrate on how the structural characteristics of IGOs can influence peace operation outcomes in civil wars.
Deborah Avant, “Netting the Empire: US Roles in Regulating Small Arms and Military and Security Services”
A1: Arms Trade—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
How to think about the US role has been the center of debates about the characterization of contemporary global politics. Though the tendency has been to argue over which role is most accurate, we might also consider the possibility that the US plays different roles in different issue areas. Network theory leads us to expect that who the US interacts with should affect what gets done and how. Looking at US roles in transnational governance initiatives vis-a-vis small arms and military and security services reveals two different patterns – one looks more like a hegemonic role, the other more like a quasi-imperial manager role. When the US acts as a hegemon, it interacts with other states and state based international organizations based on sovereign authority and beholden to domestic interests. When the US acts as an imperial manager, however, it interacts with a broader array of state, sub-state and non-state intermediaries on the basis of a wider variety of authority claims, and beholden to a more transnational set of interests. Comparing the two reveals different influences on US goals, different uses of power by the US, and different governance outcomes.
Tristin Beckman, “How You Respond Depends on from Where You Are Hit: Economic Crises and Policy Response”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
What accounts for the variation in policy responses to economic crises? This paper shows that the policy response depends, in part, on a state's position in the global trade network. Using a unique variant of the traditional spatial model with a dataset of developed and developing countries over the time period 1980 to 2012, the empirical results show that a state's level of economic performance relative to that of its main export markets is a strong predictor of fiscal policy. Contractionary fiscal policies become more likely when a sender country's economy lags in comparison to its main export markets. Expansionary fiscal policies become more likely when a sender country's economy performs well relative to its main export markets. Insights from trade theory suggest these fiscal policy responses follow the preferences of the domestic coalitions least affected by an economic crisis. In other words, a state's position in the global trade network differentially impacts the susceptibility of domestic coalitions to the effects of economic crises.
Emily Bell, Adam Henry, Bjorn Vollan , “Working Outside of Collective Action: A Study of Strategic Relationship Formation”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
How do institutional constraints and resource security drive individuals’ decisions regarding social network formation? This study analyzes the effect of these conditions in the context of natural resource management. In collective action settings, individuals may improve conservation of natural resources. Actors in these scenarios would ideally share the same desired outcome, but some participants may want benefits greater than those already generated. Propensity to defect may be countered by presence of collective action rules, but given the heterogeneity of individual wealth among participants, these same individuals may instead seek strategic relationships with others they perceive as better off in order to maximize their own benefits. Nevertheless, actors who form these ties have limited time, cognitive capacity, and ability to predict contingencies of interaction that involve reciprocity, thus leading to differential patterns of social network formation, as well as between an individual’s ideal and realized networks. For these reasons, we argue that institutional constraints and resource security will affect the structure and alter attributes of those with whom an actor works, as well as the likelihood of continuing these relationships. In the context of Filipino fishing communities, we employ t-tests to measure ideal attributes of those with whom fishers prefer to work under varying institutional and resource conditions. Next, analyzing egocentric networks, a hierarchical linear model tests how varying institutional constraints and resource security affect the structure of relationships and alter attributes of one’s working partners, and the relationship this has with the likelihood fishers will maintain these ties.
James Ben-Aaron, “Connections Between Supreme Court Opinion Centrality and Author Non-bias”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Although the differences in opinion citation rates among U.S. Supreme
Court Justices are marked enough to imply that substantive differences are in play, several possible explanations could account for the observed variation. Included within those explanations are differences in the work ethics of the Justices, more of a commitment to stare decisis, and the belief of the opinion's author that well cited opinions will exhibit greater relevance (i.e., be cited more often over time) and greater legal vitality (i.e., exhibit greater authority over time by being cited more prominently and in more important opinions). One of the strengths of network analysis is that it can expose information contained in indirect connections and thereby enables investigators to make inferences regarding the latent space that is embodied by the whole of the network. Starting from the proposition that the most central opinions are highest in overall legal relevance and vitality, a sufficient sample of opinions by each Justice should contribute to understanding some of the motivations that underlie observed variations in opinion citation frequency and quality.
While we do have overall centrality values for individual justices, these numbers are not overly informative. Because many justices drift over their careers in terms of their ideology, a single mean centrality score could be hiding a story of a significant drift over time in terms of that Justices preference for selecting matters. Thus, the centrality scores of a Justice must be calculated for shorter intervals to expose any evolving changes in propensity for citing to well embedded opinions. In this paper, theories regarding the utility of the centrality measure may be tested against these migrating values.
William Bendix, Jon MacKay, “Leaders, Factions, and Networks of Interests: Partisan Infighting among House Republicans”
C3: Legislative Networks—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
Scholars view congressional parties either as legislative teams made up of likeminded members or as organizations composed of competing factions. Because Tea Party legislators have repeatedly defied their Republican leaders, interest in intraparty factions has grown. But scholars have not developed a quantitative method for identifying factions and their respective members. We thus ask two questions: How can we detect multiple factions within the congressional parties? And how do leaders of the House majority manage conflicting factions within their party?
To answer our first question, we use annual interest-group scores from more than 100 organizations to estimate the ideological locations of House members from 2001 to 2012. Specifically, we create a two-mode network relating interest groups and their annual ratings of all House members. We project this two-mode network to create two separate single-mode networks: 1) where interest groups are related by the similarity in which they score House members, and 2) where legislators are related by the similarity in which they have been rated by interest groups. Then, using a clustering algorithm, we detect stable sets of ideological factions within each party. To answer our second question, we see whether House Republican leaders in the majority provide rewards to members in their party’s ideological core and withhold rewards from members in peripheral factions. For example, we see whether faction members often have their bills blocked from the House floor. We find strong evidence that Republican leaders tend to penalize members in both moderate and extreme factions of the party.
William Berger, Patrick Grim, Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, Jiin Jung, Scott Page, “Epistemic Sorrows and Triumphs of Representative Democracy: Condorcet and Hong-Page”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Among the virtues claimed for democratic decision-making are epistemic virtues. When there is a correct answer, generally speaking, a democratic majority is more likely to get the answer right. If that is true, and to the extent it is true, we have an epistemic justification for democracy above and beyond any other ethical or social virtues that might be claimed in its favor. We use both analytic and computational methods to test these virtues on a representational structure. By configuring our agents in hierarchical networks and restricting the flow of communication in deliberate manners, we are able to identify conditions under which political representation advances or harms democracy's epistemic ends. Our results show that justification in terms of counting votes and deliberation play out differently in terms of representation. In the case of the Condorcet Theorem, representative democracy does a worse epistemic job than does its purer simple-majority relative. When it comes to votes, representation compromises the epistemic virtues of democracy. But representation does not appear to compromise the epistemic virtues of talk, as embodied in the Hong-Page result. For a wide range of variations, the virtues of diverse discussion hold up within a representational structure; within the configurations considered, representational structure does not compromise the epistemic virtues of democratic discussion. At the end of the paper, we show that these results point towards a form of representational structure that actually amplifies those virtues slightly—a particular form of representative discussion that proves epistemically superior to a full public alternative.
Rachel Blum, “From FreedomWorks to Grassroots: Social Networks in the Tea Party”
B8: Social Media, Social Protest—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
In May 2014, David Brat defeated Eric Cantor in the Republican Primary in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, dismaying the Republican establishment, delighting the Tea Party, and confusing political scientists and pundits. The main source of confusion for observers was Brat’s lack of support from the national Tea Party groups and PACs, which led many to question how he won and whether this could be considered a Tea Party victory. This confusion highlights one question in particular: who is the Tea Party? Is it astroturf or grassroots, libertarian or establishment, focused on economics or religion? Using an original social network dataset of over 670 grassroots Tea Party groups and the nearly 6,000 organizations and individuals with which they affiliate, this chapter provides insight into the configuration of the Tea Party community. The Tea Party is not, in fact, led by libertarians, ’elite’ Tea Party groups, establishment Republicans, or any other group. Prominent voices exist within the movement, but these voices are myriad, and the strands of conservatism they represent are diverse. By leveraging the tools of social network analysis and exponential random graph models (ERGMs), this chapter provides additional evidence for the larger argument of this research project: that the Tea Party is best understood as a diffuse movement united by distrust and a strategy of remaking the GOP from within.
Joshua Boston, Jonathan Homola, Betsy Sinclair, Michelle Torres, Patrick Tucker, “Political Polarization and Lifestyle Differences in America”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Do our basic daily choices, from the comics we read to the sports we play, segregate us into distinct ideological communities? Using a 2000 person US national probability sample with almost 700 survey items on lifestyle choices ranging from recreational activities to media consumption to food preferences, we apply three tools from network analysis to ascertain whether there is evidence that individual choices divide respondents into ideological communities. A community detection algorithm, latent class analysis, and principle-components analysis indicate that, indeed, Americans are divided into two communities based upon their lifestyle choices. The greatest predictor of these communities is partisanship, even when controlling for race, education, region, gender, knowledge, and religiosity. We suggest that this ideological clustering with respect to lifestyles has the potential to dampen cross-partisan deliberation and discussion across citizens.
Aisha Bradshaw, Skyler J. Cranmer, Philip Leifeld, Weihua Li, Caitlin Clary, “We Get By with a Little Help From Our Friends: Common Allies and their Role in Suppressing Bilateral Conflict”
A6: Alliances—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Alliances are partially intended, though do not always function as, a means to ensure peace between two states. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. But to what extent does peace between two states depend on the alliance connections those states have in common? Here, we consider how shared alliances function as a mechanism for the promotion of peace within a dyad. Specifically, we propose a network-based theory of distinct micro-processes occurring within the subnetworks composed of a focal dyad and their common allies, which produce differentially suppressive effects on the conflict propensity of that focal pair. An empirical analysis using the temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM) finds that common alliance ties exert stronger pressures for peace as the alliance mechanism becomes stronger. That is, shared allies only produce a suppressive effect on conflict when
all states have ties to one another through membership in a multilateral alliance, and the effects of shared alliances interact strongly with the direct contiguity of states.
Heike Brugger, “The German Energy transition at the local level - A Discourse Network Analysis for identifying fostering and hindering discourse patterns and network structures”
B7: Innovation and Policy Learning—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
The German Energiewende (energy transition towards a green energy supply) is a unique national project. It represents the German response to at least three policy problems: 1) global climate change, 2) dependence on foreign energy resources, and 3) the wish to opt out of nuclear energy. Most renewable energy project implementation under this policy takes place at the state and county level. Involving communities in the decision making process helps to attenuate controversy arising from NIMBYism. Some counties have made significant progress towards a transition to renewable energies, while others are lacking behind. This paper uses three emerging approaches for policy analysis - discourse theory, network analysis and Narrative Policy Analysis - to explain variation in county implementation of renewable energy projects.
The Discourse Network Analysis (Leifeld 2009, 2012) allows to analyze networks present in discourses; thus systematizing the qualitative coding of documents and structuring the results of the analysis in form of networks. The Narrative Policy Analysis (Jones 2010) aims in making narrative analysis replicable and structured in order to satisfy the conditions for scientific methods set by Sabatier (2000). This paper shows that the two approaches of Discourse Network Analysis and Narrative Policy Analysis are complementary and can highly benefit from each other. The papers theoretical aim is to show how these two approaches can be fruitfully combined, while the empirical aim lies in identifying different discourse patterns and network structures to explain successful and limping implementation of renewable energies at the county level.
Jeffrey Carnegie, “ Leader Behavior in Multiple Simultaneous Wars”
A2: Decision-Making and Conflict—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
I investigate the initiation and cessation of wars using a separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) in order to determine how state leaders make war decisions in a multiplayer environment. I find that when a state is at war, its leader is less likely to initiate additional wars, and is more likely to end existing wars. Other state leaders are more likely to initiate war with a state already at war. These effects can be represented by a simply alteration of the capacity term, rather than a network simulation. I explore the effects of other network structures, and account for strategic censoring as well. I suggest a better method for analyzing causes of conflict than typical dyadicly independent logistic regressions.
Julia Choucair Vizoso, “Elite Networks and Authoritarian Stability”
C1: Clientelism and Governance—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
How do political coalitions form in authoritarian regimes? Why are some ruling coalitions more stable than others–why do some persist, while others are dissolved through coup d’état, failed coup attempts, and extensive purges? Existing explanations of authoritarian stability emphasize three factors: individual members’ attributes, material payoffs, and formal institutions. This paper argues that to understand the variation in authoritarian stability, scholars must situate elites in their organizational and social context. It proposes a network theory of authoritarian coalition formation, whereby coalitions are a product of a society’s elite network structure. Elite networks differ in systematic ways in their members’ patterns of organizational and social relationships; these different relational configurations have distinct implications for coalitional trajectories. Specifically, the level of polarization in elite networks determines the bargaining environment and the repertoire of coalitional opportunities, with systematic effects on the lifespan of particular arrangements. The paper employs original archival and interview evidence to trace the evolution of elite networks in Iraq and Syria and their effect on coalitional stability.
Alison Craig, Skyler Cranmer, Bruce Desmarais, Christopher Clark, Vincent Moscardelli, “The Role of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Congressional Cosponsorship Network”
C3: Legislative Networks—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
Previous research indicates that race, ethnicity, and gender influence legislative behavior in important ways. The bulk of this research, however, focuses on the way race, ethnicity, and gender shape an individual legislator's behavior, making it less clear how these characteristics account for relationships between legislators. An ideal way to understand the way legislators relate to one another is to examine the cosponsorship process as it taps the relational component of representation. We expect that race, ethnicity, and gender will influence the cosponsorship network because of the salience of group identity and electoral pressures. Using a temporal exponential random graph model, we examine the U.S. House cosponsorship network from 1981 through 2004 to identify patterns of assortative and disassortative mixing. We find that while racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women, display a strong tendency towards the homophily that characterizes most social networks, whites and males cosponsor legislation introduced by minorities at rates equal to their support for their own in-group. We argue that this tendency for disassociative mixing is the result of members using cosponsorship of minority-sponsored legislation to broaden their own electoral base of support and it is most prevalent among electorally vulnerable members and those representing districts with significant minority populations.
Alison Craig, “Strategy, Relationships and Shared Constituencies: Policy Collaboration in the U.S. House of Representatives”
C7: Strong Network Weak Party—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Conventional views treat the U.S. Congress as a collection of 435 independent representatives, despite the oft-cited importance of relationships inside the chamber. We observe substantial collaboration between members on policy and yet this collaboration has received little attention in the political science literature. In this paper, I examine who collaborates with whom in Congress using a unique dataset of Dear Colleague letters sent between members and an exponential random graph model (ERGM). I argue that members purposively seek collaborations with their colleagues and these collaborations are the result of three considerations: shared constituencies, existing relationships, and strategic goals. Members collaborate with colleagues from the same state and fellow committee members, demonstrating homophilous tendencies among those who represent the same interests. Existing connections within the policy collaboration network are an important factor, as members are more likely to work together when they share a common collaborative partner, demonstrating the importance of a relational view of Congress. Most strikingly, I find that bipartisan collaboration is a frequent occurrence despite the polarization of the contemporary Congress. Members of both parties seek out collaborators who represent distinct ideological positions to create a broad base of support for their legislation, suggesting that even in an era of heavy polarization, members from opposing parties are still able to find common ground.
Aysenur Dal, Robert M. Bond, “A Networked Violation of Gag Orders: Twitter Coverage of Banned Issues in Turkey”
B8: Social Media, Social Protest—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
Citizens’ capacity to access information has become increasingly widespread as more people are using information-communication technologies. Government-issued gag orders may fail to prevent the public from searching for, commenting on or disseminating information about banned issues, making investigation of non-mainstream coverage of these topics crucial. Using a new dataset of randomly sampled public tweets about politics, we aim to explore the patterns in the Turkish Twitter coverage of government-banned issues around the most recent presidential election in August 2014. Turkey stands out with a dynamic political Twittersphere that includes both pro- and anti-government users. Given the government’s negative stance towards Twitter so far, knowing who the sources of production and dissemination of online content on banned issues are can shed more light on the overall implications of content restrictions on mass media. Here, we analyze the production and dissemination of information on banned issues. We identify tweets containing banned content and track its spread through the network of Twitter users. We analyze the patterns of conversation on banned issues by anti- and pro-government users as well as ties between users and their indicated sources of information. Thus, we aim to provide a better understanding on anti-government users’ role in creating the Twitter coverage on banned issues vis-à-vis the role played by their pro-government counterparts.
Ryan Dawe, “State Legislative Committee Overlap: Effects on the Underlying Structures”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
All politics is local, and a gridlocked Congress has placed increased responsibility on state legislatures for important lawmaking. Committees are critical units within state legislatures and the relationships between them inform us of the underlying structure and culture within that chamber. Based on committee membership data from across US state legislatures, a networks approach allows for the comparison of committee overlap networks across chambers, states, and regions. Common theories of legislative committees suggest different expectations for committee overlap networks and the high variation across chamber rules show how both behavioral and institutional factors affect the committee structure. Looking across comparable networks allows us to explain the influence of these factors on the observable committee overlap.
Ashlie Denton, “Evaluating the Role of Commitment and Narrative in Transnational Environmental Governance Networks in the Pacific Islands”
A5: Networks and Global Governance—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
In Pacific Island nations, environmental degradation is happening at a rapid rate, primarily due to global climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made calls for international cooperation in governance to mitigate these changes. Transnational environmental governance networks are emerging that include the Pacific Island nations, NGOs, INGOs, and states that are external to the region (e.g., the United States and France). These decision-making bodies face unique problems of collective action, where major institutions in the region have low levels of capacity or are largely questioned by the people, the costs of mitigation are either regionally or globally diffuse, and the benefits of collective action would unequally benefit specific marginal communities. This presentation looks at if and how these environmental networks overcome collective action problems.
While not addressing the full range of issues that can influence the collective action problem, I argue that a greater understanding of commitment can shed light onto the ways in which individuals make choices to move their time and organizational resources into transnational environmental governance networks. This commitment is strengthened through the formation of narrative-networks," or networks that coalesce around a particular storyline. The use of characterization—heroes, villains, and victims, both human and nonhuman—creates an "us" and "them," which increases the level of commitment to the network that can overcome collective action problems. In this presentation, the context for othering is examined, as well as the gaps in the conventional narrative that are employed by the narrative-networks."
Marya Doerfel, Jack L. Harris, “Longitudinal Disaster response networks: The clash of institutional and emergent organizations”
B2: Governance and Organizational Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
A community’s organizations and businesses are connected through cross-sector relationships for reasons such as resource needs, collective action endeavors, and information sharing. These communities come to have somewhat stable structures with qualities that evoke notions of resilience at the organizational level. When a disaster strikes, however, the networks that provide the social infrastructure can be dramatically impacted, especially if the disaster warrants community-wide evacuation. In short, disaster challenges the very resilience of a stable community, so much so that national level support is needed and expected. This research is about the dynamics of the pre-existing community networks as response activities unfold. While Offices of Emergency Management are nested to facilitate relationships within communities, national level forces generally take days to arrive to disaster scenes. Meanwhile, local first responders and emergency managers, faith-based groups, businesses, organizations, and citizen volunteers take up response efforts. Indeed, through mobilizing efforts, community organizations begin reconnecting which can refortify community resilience. Field work including participant observation and interviews was used to generate the dynamics of community networks and their clashes as on-the-ground response and rebuilding unfolded in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. By assessing communication networks, findings reveal a dense core of local organizations and citizen volunteers that is hard to penetrate by national level agencies once they arrive. Implications consider major blocks to local and national collaborative efforts stemming from cohesive networks rich in social capital along with clashes between organizations that are nimble and networked versus those that are more rigid and bureaucratic.
Marina Duque, “Status in International Politics: The Formation of Diplomatic Networks”
A8: Networks and IR theory—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
Notwithstanding the growing consensus that status matters in international politics, it is unclear how status should be conceptualized and measured. Traditional approaches measure status by looking at the distribution of resources among states and thus incur in problems such as emphasizing material resources to the detriment of symbolic ones, mistaking social relations for actors' properties, and imposing on the social structure the categories chosen by the observer. Following Weber, I conceptualize status as an effective claim to social esteem. Although status is associated with actor attributes, it is ultimately founded on social recognition. Therefore, the status order emerges from both exogenous and endogenous processes. In terms of exogenous processes, status is derived from an actor's perceived competence in performing their functions. Evaluations of state competence influence state practices that express recognition—in particular, diplomacy. More specifically, the more competent a state is perceived to be, the more diplomatic recognition it receives. In terms of endogenous processes, acts of recognition are interdependent. Four effects in particular influence the formation of diplomatic ties: popularity, sociality, reciprocity, and triad closure. I use an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to analyze tie formation in the network of diplomatic representations obtained from the Correlates of War diplomatic exchange dataset (1985-2005). This method is appropriate due to the endogenous component of my theory and the relational nature of the data. I show that both exogenous and endogenous processes form the micro-level foundations of the international status order.
Nicholas Eubank, “Social Networks, Ethnicity, and Political Accountability”
A7: Protest, Conflict, and Network Ties—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
This paper uses a novel source of data -- six months of detailed and geocoded telecommunications data from a cell phone provider in Zambia -- to test the relationship between social network properties and the capacity of citizens to engage in social sanctioning, collective action, and informal information sharing. Social network properties are separately measured for the cell-phone networks of residents in each of Zambia's 150 National Assembly electoral districts and more than 1,000 Local Council electoral districts. These properties are correlated with network measures of collective action (like contributions to community public-goods and protest participation) and voter political knowledge estimated using census and demographic surveys and Afrobarometer data. In each case, these political outcomes are related by theory to specific network properties. First, capacity for citizens to engage in social sanctioning is related -- through a game-theoretic model -- to the degree to which individuals share mutual friends. Second, the capacity to organize large groups is related to network fragmentation, operationalized as a Herfindahl index of the inductively-determined community structure of social networks (generated using a Constant Potts Model (CPM) resolution-free community detection algorithm). And third, the ability to share information is related to diffusion rates in simulations based on epidemiological models. Finally, census data is used to examine the relationship between co-ethnicity and social network proximity, testing the hypothesis that ethnic fragmentation is correlated with poor development outcomes because ethnically fragmented communities suffer from fragmented social networks.
William Eveland, Hyunjin Song, Myiah J. Hutchens, “What "Don't Know" Causes Us to Not Know About Accuracy in Political Perceptions in Network Data”
B6: Innovations in Network Measurement—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Understanding the accuracy of an ego’s political perceptions of alters in social networks (e.g., their vote choice or partisan identification) is an important topic of study. Those interested in the process of person perception emphasize the processes that can lead to accurate vs. inaccurate political perceptions of alters, whereas others may hope to validate the accuracy of unverifiable ego perceptions in name generator studies in which alters are not interviewed. Politically, misperceptions of alter beliefs may have consequences for social influence, selective exposure, attitudinal ambivalence, and political participation. Finally, political misperceptions can have interpersonal consequences when, for instance, an ego expresses strong negative affect regarding people who support Candidate X to an alter without knowing that this alter supports Candidate X– and thereby negatively affects their social relationship.
The present study builds upon prior research to consider the distinction between having explicitly inaccurate political perceptions – that is, the belief that Alter B supports Candidate X when she supports Candidate Y– compared to not having clear perceptions of alter preferences one way or the other (as represented by responses such as “don’t know”). This distinction follows significant debate regarding how “don’t know” responses should be treated in the construction of political knowledge measures. Building on prior research that considered don’t know responses to be inaccurate perceptions (Eveland & Hutchens, 2013), we employ whole network data from 25 groups with roughly 15-35 members each to understand the factors that produce “don’t know” vs. explicitly inaccurate political perceptions within a voluntary organizational context.
Taylor Feenstra, Margaret Schwenzfeier, “Using Network Context to Detect Sarcasm in Political Conversations on Twitter”
B5: Online Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
Individuals have become increasingly engaged in political discussion on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and political science and communications scholars have analyzed these discussions to better understand public sentiment toward politics, candidates, and current events. However, even the most refined coding schemes have not yet been able to account for sarcasm in these analyses (Davidov, Tsur, and Rappoport 2010). Failing to account for sarcasm can systematically bias results, potentially distorting our understanding of the public opinion expressed by opinion leaders on social media sites. Using machine learning techniques, along with previously established network-based approaches to determine the context of content by estimating user ideology (Barberà 2014), we develop a model to detect sarcasm in political tweets about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in 2009, derived from a sample of 467 million English-language Twitter posts from 20 million users covering a seven-month period between June 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009 (Yang & Leskovec, 2011). We then conduct sentiment analysis on the set of tweets including and excluding the sarcastic tweets to analyze whether accounting for sarcasm affects the measurement of public opinion regarding the Affordable Care Act.
Manuel Fischer, Karin Ingold, “Explaining policy positions on fracking regulation: A comparison of Exponential Random Graph Models on preference similarities of actors in Switzerland and the UK”
B1: Environmental Policy Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
In many European countries, hydraulic fracturing is a prominent and highly contested issue in societal, scientific and political debates. The debate is shaped by scientific uncertainty as well as strong conflict among actors. Given these two elements of complexity, our paper asks how the political elite, including public and private organizations, manages to produce any feasible regulation on the issue of hydraulic fracturing in Europe. We thus investigate coordinated instrument selection and rely on the network concept of preference similarity. Further, two contextual factors further challenge decision-making with respect to hydraulic fracturing, i.e. multi-level governance and cross-sectoral decision-making. We evaluate what factors foster such preference similarity and hypothesize that trust-building (Carpenter et al. 2004), information exchange (Leifeld and Schneider 2012), the joint understanding of the problem through a specific disciplinary lense, participation in the same venues (Schneider et al. 2003), and an agreement on core beliefs all drive actors to prefer similar regulatory measures (Weible and Sabatier 2005). We propose a comparative research design between 3 sub-national entities in Switzerland (CH) and national policy-making in the UK. This case selection covers (1) countries where the main competence for regulation lies at the central level (UK) and at the regional level (CH), as well as (2) countries where policy outcomes rather point towards more permissive and liberal solutions (UK) and more restrictive policies (CH). Through an exponential random graph model (ERGM) we then investigate drivers for coordinated policy regulation.
Jose Antonio Fortou Reyes, Anna M. Meyerrose, “Voting Networks in the European Parliament and Party Development in Central and Eastern Europe”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
What do patterns of voting among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) reveal about party system development in new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? Most comparative studies analyze party development in post-communist Europe through a domestic lens, looking at changes in the electorate, party organizations and electoral rules. Meanwhile, the work to date on MEP voting has failed to take into account the endogenous effects of the voting behavior network structure. Building on these literatures, we suggest that this network at the EP level (beginning in 2004, the first year that CEE states became members of the European Union) can provide insight into the extent to which party systems have been consolidated in the region. We seek to answer these questions by using a temporal exponential random graph model on the network of voting behavior in the 2004-2009 parliaments, focusing in particular on contentious voting issues. We find that, over time, MEPs from CEE have become more likely to vote along party and party family lines, rather than along regional or national lines, and also that the network structure of voting among CEE MEPs begins to more closely resemble the structure among MEPs from older, western member states. This suggests a higher degree of party system development and consolidation in the new CEE democracies than is often suggested in the comparative politics literature.
Lisa Friedland, Stefan Wojcik, David Lazer, “Keeping Congress Connected? The Influence of Staff Movements on Congressional Working Relationships”
C3: Legislative Networks—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
What can we learn about the workings of Congress from data about the staffers employed there? Members of Congress rely on their staff to provide accurate information, negotiate policy, and collaborate on their behalf. Do staff influence the collaborations among lawmakers behind the scenes, and can we observe this influence when they change offices? Using data provided by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Sunlight Foundation, we use two study designs to detect these effects. First, when a staffer moves between offices, does this strengthen ties between the old and new offices, ties such as co-sponsorships and joint statements? Second, we investigate whether staffers provide continuity across sessions of Congress. When a district elects a new Representative, and inherits old staffers, do collaboration patterns of the new office resemble those of their predecessor?
Alexander Furnas, Devin Gaffney, “Lobbying Strategy Diffusion in Canadian Politics: a latent network approach”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Studies of lobbying in North America, have tended to focus largely on activities and strategies of interest groups and their lobbyists in American politics. Coordination among interest groups is often studied through by looking at coalitions, using interview-based methods. The lax reporting requirements of the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) yields overly broad data which limits scholars’ ability to systematically address detailed questions about these groups’ strategic environments at scale. LDA data are not sufficiently detailed to explore which government officials lobbyists target, under what conditions they target them, or the manner in which interests’ lobbying strategy is informed by the concurrent lobbying activity of other ally or opposing interests. In this paper we find more fertile ground for enquiries of this kind by turning to Canada, which has similar lobbying laws as the United States, but requires significantly more detailed reporting of lobbying communications. Data from the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada allows us to build a time-series network of communication between lobbyists and government officials between 2008 and 2014 with resolution down to the specific day that a communication occurred. These data enable us to explore patterns in lobbying activity within the network, at a scale and detail impossible in other countries. We conceptualize a dyadic relationship wherein a firm might set its lobbying strategy by copying a strategy from one of its peers. These relationships, taken together, imply a network of lobbying strategy diffusion among interest groups and their lobbying firms. The time-series communication yields a set of potential strategy emulation dyads. We apply the NETINF algorithm for latent network inference to this to estimate an underlying lobbying strategy diffusion network. We then estimate the effects of various firm covariates on the follower/leader positions of actors within the latent strategy network.
Emily Gade, Michael Gabbay, Zane Kelly, “Militant Networks and Violence in Iraq and Syria”
A2: Decision-Making and Conflict—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Many modern insurgencies and civil wars are fragmented conflicts in which militant movements consist of a proliferation of multiple independent armed groups. We discuss how a network-analytic perspective can be used to yield insight into militant use of violence and factional dynamics. Making contact with the militant fragmentation literature, we put forth theoretical propositions that relate network structure to key militant behaviors such as infighting, outbidding towards more extreme violence, and alliance formation. We describe an empirical approach to addressing these questions which constructs networks and violence policies from militant rhetoric using automated text processing. Network ties are constructed between groups using claims of joint operations and joint statements. Operational claims are used to calculate a “targeting policy” variable which measures how discriminate or expansive militant targeting practices are based on the types of target classes – e.g., regime security forces, foreign forces, rival groups, government workers, civilians – that militant groups claim to attack. We present initial empirical results using data from the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Network metrics, visualizations, and exponential random graph modeling are used to elucidate network structure and relate it to targeting policy.
Sarah Galey, Gioacchino Pappalardo, “Developing stakeholder buy-in for networked governance: Analysis from place-based reform in two regions of Sicily ”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Place-based approaches to rural development are increasingly favored around the world because they aim to strengthen the resilience of rural areas against global pressures by decreasing state dependencies and increasing the capacity of rural areas to self-manage their natural, cultural and economic resources. The concept of "regional governance" characterizes different forms of decentralized political co-ordination where diverse array s of rural actors must develop joint visions and norms for collaboration. Relatedly, concepts of "public value management" point to structural arrangements that focus on fostering stakeholder buy-in as a motivational force to drive public sector practice and reform, rather than relying solely on rules and incentives. Overall, raising collective agency is critical for place-based development and networks between regional actors are both central to the concept of regional governance and the development of stakeholder buy-in. Departing from this analytical framework, we examine the impact of social networks on stake-holder buy-in in two regions of Sicily undergoing an EU place-based policy reform, LEADER. The LEADER program supports the development of rural regions by establishing Local Action Groups (LAGs) that distribute policy resources in cooperative governance structures. We collected longitudinal survey data on the social networks and levels of buy-in from the members of two regional LAGs. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA), we then modeled the impact of network influence on stakeholder buy-in within the LAGs. Preliminary results suggest that exposure to network members with high levels of buy-in has a positive impact on the development of buy-in within the LAGs.
Charles Gomez, David Lazer, “The Tragedy of the Network”
B3: Evolution of Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
In many social contexts, individuals choose a set of social interactions to maximize their private benefit, but the resulting social network structure is a public phenomenon that affects all members of the network. This paper builds on previous research by the authors (Lazer and Friedman 2007), which found that under certain circumstances efficient collaborative networks (e.g., small world networks) yield poor system-wide results. In this paper, we assume that the structure and efficiency of the network is endogenous, the result of an evolutionary process where “networking strategies” that yield greater success for agents will eventually dominate the system. Results of an agent-based model show that while sparse networks perform better in the long run because they maintain diversity, individual actors that are well connected systematically do better than poorly connected actors. The long run equilibrium is a highly connected network, through which information flows rapidly, wiping out diversity, and resulting in a poorly performing system. The "tragedy of the network" is that if everyone acts in their best interest, the resulting network will be worse for everyone.
Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Pablo Barbera, “The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests”
B8: Social Media, Social Protest—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
Social media have created instrumental means of communication in many recent political protests. The role of online networks in disseminating timely information has been as enshrined by commentators as users derided for the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button. In this paper we consider the role of these peripheral participants, the immense majority that surrounds the small epicenter of protests, creating layers of decreasing activity around the committed minority. We analyze three datasets tracking protest communication in three different languages and political contexts. We provide consistent evidence that peripheral participants are critical in raising awareness and generating content at levels comparable to core participants. Although committed minorities are the heart of the protests, their success in raising awareness depends on activating the sounding board of the critical periphery.
Christopher Graziul, “Venues, Generalized Trust, and Partisan Voting: How Where We Live Affects How We Vote”
C8: Voting and Political Participation—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
This paper presents a novel analytic object for studying the intersection of location, social networks, and voting behavior. The object, termed a venue, is the synthesis of a persistent social context with a discrete space for social interaction (e.g. a restaurant). I argue that venues provide two crucial conditions for social network formation: (1) the ability to interact, (2) guidelines regarding how to interact. In other words, venues impose social constraints on with whom we can interact, how we can interact with them, and the social outcomes of these interactions. I utilize this framework to analyze voting behavior in four recent United States presidential elections (2000, 2004, 2008, 2012). I generalize and extend previous work by Mutz (2002) on cross-cutting social networks and McClurg (2006) on contextualized social network effects to investigate how the regular, episodic formation of weak ties within venues affects vote choice. I expect that the unintentional yet everyday formation of ties within ostensibly “apolitical” venues cultivates a form of generalized trust that makes voters less responsive to a parochial framing of political issues. Using county level data, I test the hypothesis that areas with more venues per capita are less likely to vote for Republican candidates. Analysis suggests region-specific support for this hypothesis and invites further reflection on the structuring role of the built environment on political behavior.
Jennifer Hadden, Lorien Jasny, “'The power of peers: how transnational advocacy networks shape NGO strategies on climate change'”
A7: Protest, Conflict, and Network Ties—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
How do networks influence the actors working within them? This paper uses network autocorrelation models to establish two ways in which the strategies of climate change NGOs are shaped by their embeddedness in transnational advocacy networks. First, NGOs tend to match the behavior of the organizations to whom they are adjacent in the network – their partners and allies. Second, NGOs also mimic the behavior of organizations that have equivalent positions in the network – their potential substitutes and competitors. Considering relational processes significantly expands our ability to explain NGO behavior, complementing explanations that operate at the contextual or actor level. Our results offer evidence that climate change NGOs combine principled and pragmatic reasoning in their decision-making, enhancing our understanding of their preferences, the sources of diversity among them, and the role of networks in shaping their strategic choices.
Matthew Hamilton, Emilinah Namaganda, Mark Lubell, “Policy networks and climate change adaptation in the Lake Victoria Basin: a multi-scale perspective”
A5: Networks and Global Governance—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
We study patterns of interaction among actors participating in collaborative decision-making institutions designed to increase adaptive capacity to the effects of climate change within the Lake Victoria Basin in East Africa. Over the past several years, heightened attention to climate change has significantly restructured the policy landscape within the Basin, for example through the creation of new policy institutions.
In this evolving institutional setting, adaptation policy outcomes reflect processes such as social learning and cooperation among groups of actors seeking to develop and implement policy. We contend that outcomes are also strongly contingent on linkages between institutions stemming from individual actors’ involvement in multiple institutions such as legislative bodies, working groups and steering committees. In these multi-scale systems, patterns of interaction within scale (e.g., national actors participating in national policy institutions) and across scale (e.g., national actors participating in regional institutions) help reveal the underlying processes that drive policy development and implementation. Yet the ways in which these cross-scale linkages shape actor behavior and institutional performance remain poorly understood. Our research addresses this gap.
We collected data through in-person surveys, semi-structured interviews and follow-up web-based surveys with 148 representatives of stakeholder organizations involved in climate change adaptation policy institutions within the Lake Victoria Basin. We find that cross-scale linkages are associated with greater satisfaction with the use of science in decision-making process, but less satisfaction with the fairness of those processes and overall cooperation among actors. We will also discuss conditions under which these general trends are reversed or strengthened.
Michael Heaney, James M. Strickland, “Interest Group Networks”
C5: Lobbying and Interests—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
Social network analysis has long been relied upon to examine the behavior of interest groups in the United States. The first empirical studies of interest groups using this methodology were conducted by Edward Laumann and his colleagues in the 1980s, with research in this tradition continuing actively into the 2010s. The purpose of this essay is to take stock of the rich body of evidence that has emerged and how it addresses substantive, theoretical, and methodological issues relevant to interest group politics. We focus on four areas of research: (1) Communication by lobbyists; (2) Coalition building; (3) Participation by interest groups across domains of politics; and (4) Group influence over the policy process. In each of these areas, we highlight how network analysis has informed answers to substantive questions, but also point to missed opportunities and errant paths. For example, analyses of multiplex interest group networks have demonstrated the linkages between the lobbying activities of groups and their campaign finance contributions, but have often neglected the role of formal political institutions in shaping these patterns. Thus, the essay both emphasizes the ways that network analysis has expanded what is known about interest groups and calls attention to the limiting features of network analysis as a methodological approach. We point to theoretical concepts that could be used to greater effect by interest group scholars, such as homophily, brokerage, and multiplexity. We conclude by pointing to how network analysis could be applied fruitfully to emerging research areas, such as the activities of interest groups on social media and the transformation of the business aspects of lobbying.
Adam Henry, Thomas Dietz, “Learning to Manage Environmental Risk in Policy Networks”
B7: Innovation and Policy Learning—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Networks are an important part of the policy process, and in many realms of environmental policy networks exercise an important influence on the ability of actors to synthesize information and learn to manage complex risks. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the dynamics of policy network formation lead to structures exhibiting belief-oriented segregation–that is, a high correspondence between shared policy beliefs and voluntary collaborative relationships. These structures may be produced through at least two pathways: belief homophily, where actors actively seek out connections with others sharing their belief system, and learning, where policy beliefs diffuse through collaborative ties. The cross-sectional design of many policy network studies precludes an explicit examination of these potentially complementary forces. This paper explicitly examines these dynamics using a reanalysis of data on policy beliefs and networking in U.S. environmental risk policy across two time periods, 1984 and 2000 (N = 223). Results indicate strong homophily effects, but relatively weak learning effects, in the evolution of this policy network. This research helps pave the way for additional research on the dynamics that share policy networks and beliefs, and also helps to clarify the differences between individual versus organizational contributions to policy network evolution.
Jacob Hileman, Mark Lubell, “From local to global: analyzing multi-level water resources governance networks in Central America”
B1: Environmental Policy Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
This paper examines the role of regional and global development organizations in bringing together local-level actors to improve coordination around water resources development and management. Using relational data (n=624) collected through an online search of water development programs in Central America, we test hypotheses of network structural characteristics with respect to the functions of water governance networks at multiple levels. We first examine the local (within-country) networks, where we find closed structures and high levels of clustering support on-the-ground project implementation, and the regional (Central America-wide) network, where we find more open structures support information and resource sharing. We then turn our attention to the cross-scale ties that connect local actors to the regional and global network of water development actors active in Central America. We hypothesize that these cross-scale linkages impart “small-world” properties upon the resulting multi-level network, as evidenced by decreasing mean path lengths and increasing clustering coefficients, and develop exponential random graph models to test these hypotheses. The significance of detecting small-world properties in the context of water governance networks is that small-world structures balance local-level clustering and global connectivity, which simultaneously supports project implementation at the local scale and facilitates the spread of information and resources regionally. The results of this study broaden the theoretical understanding of small-world and multi-level networks, and expand the scope of the empirical literature by examining networks of water resource actors in an international development setting.
Matthew Howell, William Hatcher, “The Shape of Legislative Committee Networks and their Influence on Public Budgets”
C3: Legislative Networks—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
American state legislatures, like all legislatures, make decisions by aggregating the preferences of their members. A key component of that aggregation is the committee process, through which legislatures find the will –or at least majority –of their members. Committees are a way for legislators to specialize in few things, but the multiple assignments of most legislators also means that committees are a vector for communication across the entire legislature. While each committee may be self-contained, it will draw information from any committees on which its members also sit. Committee structure, therefore, is a network within the legislature. It follows, then, that the structure of that network may affect the behavior of a given state. In this paper, a dataset of state legislative committee assignments is presented and described. Then, as a test of concept, the centrality, density, and betweenness of state legislative committee networks (that is, which committees are most connected) are used to explain a common measure of state policy performance: the state’s bond ratings. Other possible uses for, or expansions with, this data are then considered.
Douglas Hughes, Derek K. Stafford, “Social Distance and Clientelism: ”
C1: Clientelism and Governance—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
Research on clientelism generally asks how club membership influences the distribution of private goods. In the political economy of development, co-ethnicity and political party membership are frequently used as proxies for club membership. These operationalizations treat club membership as dichotomous: individuals are either in or out (Wantchekon 2003). Here, we argue that the binary conceptualization of group membership is problematic and ignores how social networks might influence the distribution of club goods. Individuals who are not members of the club, yet are socially close to people who are in it, should enjoy many of the same benefits of membership. To test this claim, we ran a voting experiment in 32 Honduran villages with a population of 5,000. Partnering with a regional microfinance organization, we randomly selected five candidates in each village to run for office. Villagers were informed that the successfully elected candidate would be responsible for investing money provided by the microfinance organization. As such, they could invest in either club or public goods.
In this paper, we present results of two levels of analysis. At the candidate level we analyze the demographic and social network factors that predict vote share. If the election of candidates is shaped by quality characteristics, we would expect to see well-educated candidates that have been generally active in the village political process garner votes. If, instead, vote choice is shaped by personalistic characteristics, we would expect to observe a relationship between connectedness and vote share. At the voter level we analyze the social network factors that lead a voter to cast a ballot for a candidate. Here, we evaluate how social distance shapes the vote choice, and find strong effect between social distance and candidate selection.
Eric Hundman, “Innovation as Disobedience: Xu Yanxu’s Defiance of the Emperor in the Sino-French War”
A3: Mobilizing For Violence—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
This paper tests a novel theory of individual military disobedience in war. This two-stage theory first argues that holding a brokerage position in one’s social network enables disobedience by allowing for competing interpretations of orders and better management of the consequences of disobedience. I test this proposition in the case of Xu Yanxu’s disobedience during the Sino-French War (1883-85). I first construct a novel database of Xu’s social connections, in order to trace how the intervention of prominent patrons improved his social network position immediately prior to his disobedience. My theory’s second stage argues that the likelihood of disobedience depends on whether commanders feel that their survival is at risk and whether the orders they receive are inappropriate. In Xu’s case, I leverage both egocentric and altercentric literary Chinese sources to argue that he both felt at risk and felt the emperor’s orders were inappropriate. These sources also allow me to contextualize Xu’s assessment of the war and the influence of patronage on the structure and content of Xu’s social networks. In contrast to existing literature on military decision making and change, which focuses primarily on high-level factors operating on groups, this paper finds support for a new theory of individual commanders’ decisions to disobey in war. Empirically, it also contributes a new database of egocentric network connections during a critical period in China’s history and develops an understudied case of military disobedience from historical East Asia.
Jiin Jung, Aaron Bramson, “An Agent Based Model of Indirect Minority Influence on Social Change”
B3: Evolution of Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
Social change is the process whereby a society adopts a new belief which eventually becomes accepted as a norm. Diverse subpopulations are often seen as challengers to social stability and frequent catalysts of social change (Moscovici 1976). Social psychologists have well-documented why, how, and when people can be influenced by such subpopulations. Furthermore, there are various theories on how the minority influence process can lead to social change; but little concrete research has been done to validate these postulates. A primary difficulty lies in the micro/macro differences in the phenomena: social change happens at the level of society, whereas the minority influence process happens at the interpersonal and intra-individual levels. The present study aims to clearly establish the link between the minority influence process at the local level and social change at the global level by using an agent-based model. We constructed an attitude updating algorithm based on context/categorization–leniency contract theory (Crano 2010). With minimal assumptions, we implemented it in an agent-based model. Simulation results reveal that in the face of the direct majority influence, social change can occur via the indirect minority influence process when combined with internal consistency. This finding is robust regardless of different network types. The present study establishes the cross-level link between the minority influence process at the local level and social change at the global level. We start here with a minimal model, but discuss directions for future expansions.
Julia Kamin, “Detecting “Selective sharing” of political information on social networks and its impact on polarization”
B5: Online Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
Online social networks are well known to be politically polarized; regardless of how you map online users - by friends, followers, retweets, messages, etc - ideologues tend to cluster with co-ideologues. These ideologically polarized networks are likewise reported to be polarized in the information they share - that is, distinct sets of information circulate among different ideological subnetworks. What is not fully understood are the mechanisms that lead to polarized information. The observed polarization of political information on social networks could, theoretically, be a function purely of “selective exposure;” if users predominantly chose to “follow” or “friend” co-partisans we would expect to likewise see political polarization of information. It is possible, however, that “selectively sharing” - the choices individuals make on what information to forward (re-post, retweet, etc) to their friends - would also influence the degree of polarization, particularly if users share more information that comes from fellow ideologues. This paper examines the presence and effect of “selective sharing” in two ways. First, using mathematical and agent based models, I examine the potential magnitude of selective sharing’s effect on information polarization in networks with different levels of selective exposure. In the second stage, I test for the presence of selective sharing on Twitter networks, looking both at individual users, assessing their relative bias in sharing political tweets, as well as at the network level, examining if there is, indeed, a compounding- or dampening - effect of selective sharing on what we’d expect from selective exposure alone.
Zane Kelly, Michael Gabbay, Justin Reedy, John Gastil, “Choice Shift in Small Networks”
A2: Decision-Making and Conflict—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Choice shift (also known as the risky shift effect) occurs when group discussion results in group member opinions becoming more extreme, on average, than their pre-discussion opinions. We discuss implications of choice shift for terrorist groups, wherein such movements can lead toward more extreme violence, and present the results of an experiment designed to test network structural effects on small group decision making. Our experiment tests the effects of network topology and disagreement on the presence and magnitude of choice shift in online groups discussing the outcomes of National Football League games during the 2014 season. Participants, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, were given an initial survey which assessed their level of NFL knowledge and asked to wager on the outcome of a particular game (with winnings donated to charity). To maximize the likely propensity for a risky shift we placed participants into groups in which all members favored the same team. Two network topologies were used: 1) a clique, with free communication; and 2) a broker network where the extreme poles could only communicate through a central node. Post-discussion, the extent of choice shift was calculated as the difference of the pre- and post-discussion wagers. We present results showing that network structure conditions 1) the extent of the group’s shift, and 2) individual performance. We relate these results to the predictions of an original nonlinear model of group decision.
Sara Kerosky, Michael Davidson, “Familiar Names: The Role of Family Ties in Local Elections”
C2: Electoral Ties—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Political dynasties form constellations of family relatives elected to office at various levels of government. While political dynasties are features of both mature and nascent democracies, they are especially prevalent in developing democracies with weak party systems and strong personalistic politics. Widespread reliance on clientelism and patronage not only self-perpetuates the concentration of resources and power, but also makes it difficult to determine true voter preference with regard to these powerful families. Are voters predisposed to support political dynasties? We collect council election results from over 39,000 villages in the Philippines and match candidates running in 2010 with their relatives running in 2013. We use a regression discontinuity design to isolate close elections, allowing us to simulate as-if random assignment of incumbency in 2010. We test the effect of family ties to the incumbent village council captain on a candidate's electoral success in the 2013 village council election. While candidates belonging to political families are traditionally thought to benefit from a boost at the polls, we find that candidates running for council who are related to the incumbent captain suffer a significant disadvantage. We interpret this result as evidence that, all else equal, voters prefer to vote against political families. This backlash against political families likely occurs in other elections, but is overwhelmed by other aspects of incumbency advantage that are transferred to relatives.
Brandon Kinne, “Bilateral Defense Cooperation and the New Global Security Network”
A6: Alliances—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
The study of defense cooperation has historically focused on formal military alliances, but alliances are dwindling in number and rarely invoked. In contrast, bilateral defense cooperation agreements (DCAs) have proliferated dramatically. At their most ambitious, DCAs coordinate and regulate the entirety of their respective member states' defense-related interactions, including defense industrial cooperation, weapons acquisition, mutual consultation, training and military education, research and development, and exchange of classified information. Since 1980, states have signed over 2,000 of these agreements. Taken as a whole, DCAs constitute an emerging, hitherto unexamined network of global security cooperation. This project uses newly collected relational data, covering the period 1980 to 2010, to assess the impact of this network on four key international security outcomes: militarized disputes, joint military exercises, arms trade, and overall levels of defense cooperation. Because each of these four outcomes represents a network itself, we model the relationship between DCAs and their associated security outcomes as a series of coevolving networks, where the topology of the DCA network both influences and is influenced by the topology of the outcome networks. This methodological approach allows us to account for both nonindependence and cross-network influence in international relations networks. The analysis shows that bilateral defense agreements have fundamentally changed the dynamics of global security cooperation and are now a stronger determinant of militarized disputes, joint military exercises, arms deals, and overall defense cooperation than virtually all other non-geographic influences, including alliances.
Brandon Kinne, Jonas Bunte, “Debt Networks: How Sovereign Creditors Maximize the Political Benefits of Bilateral Loans”
A8: Networks and IR theory—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
The decision of a government to lend to another government is more often guided by political payoffs than by economic considerations. Creditor governments choose borrowers that are likely to maximize the political benefits of their financial outflows. To capture these influences, we conceptualize credit relationships as a network, where sovereign government-to-government loans constitute network ties. We argue that these ties are endogenous to network structure. In particular, the degree to which a loan provides political payoffs to the creditor – for example, in the form of political goodwill – depends on whether the recipient country also receives loans from competing creditors. Thus, in order to increase the political benefits of lending, creditors condition their lending behavior on the lending of others. Applying exponential random graph models to a new dataset of creditor-debtor ties, we show that network influences endogenously determine government lending across multiple levels of interdependence. First, contrary to preferential attachment, creditors prefer lending to countries that have comparatively few ties to other creditors, as a lack of competition means that the same loan amount buys relatively more political goodwill from the recipient. Second, lenders avoid extending loans to countries to which they are themselves indebted – a negative reciprocity effect. Finally, to capture the political benefits of cooperating with the “enemy of my enemy,” lenders pursue transitivity and avoid borrowers that lack established ties to their own partners. Overall, the analysis shows that network influences are among the most consistent and substantively powerful determinants of government-to-government lending.
Austin Knuppe, William Minozzi, Jason W. Morgan, Andrew Rosenberg, “Arsenal of Democracy: An Empirical Investigation of the Domestic Defense Community of the United States”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Defense spending in the United States is often seen to be determined by so-called "iron triangles'', a symbiotic relationship among elected officials, government agencies, and private-sector corporations. While scholars have devoted much attention toward understanding political influence within the US Congress, however, relatively little is known about the topography of the military-industrial complex. This paper seeks a better understanding of the defense-spending landscape in the US by examining where agencies award private-sector defense contracts and what specific services are performed. Specifically, we construct a network of domestic defense community based on nearly 16 million federal defense contracts and contract modifications between fiscal years 2000 and 2014. Using these data, we investigate how the relationship between federal agencies and private defense contractors impact contract procurement. Contrary to previous work, we find that by only taking into consideration endogenous network structures, it is possible to predict which contracts are awarded to which firms over time.
Michael Kowal, “Getting to Know You: Lobbying, Trade Associations, and Corporate Networks”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Studies of Corporate Political Activity (CPA) often focus on individual level covariates which determine lobbying and campaign donation decisions. A limited number of studies have emphasized the role of interlocking directorates in CPA, but mostly applied to campaign donations. Even fewer have examined the role of social ties on corporate lobbying decisions. I argue that a better measure of corporate lobbying determinants is the network of common trade association membership ties between firms. The decision to lobby is conditional and based upon whether or not and the degree to which the other firms to which Fortune 500 companies have ties also lobby. I argue that much like individual decisions, corporate executives and government affairs officials take into account the political activities of those around them. This study employs network autocorrelation techniques to ascertain the effect of both individual and social network level determinants on lobbying expenditures and which issues Fortune 500 firms lobbied the United States Congress on in 2012 and 2013. In this study, I utilize data on all Fortune 500 firm lobbying expenditures, along with a unique network dataset of major trade association membership of firms. I find that the ties generated by common trade association membership significantly outperform those of interlocking directorates on determining lobbying expenditures. This work offers the potential to better understand how corporate network ties lead to firm level political activity.
Yanna Krupnikov, John Barry Ryan, Kerri Milita, “Gender Differences in the Quality of Political Discussion”
C6: Social Influence and Political Opinion—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Social networks serve as a primary source of candidate information for individuals who lack the interest or ability to pay close attention to politics. Less understood is whether networks are equally effective for all individuals. Of special concern is whether men and women respond differently to political discussion as women consistently have their knowledge and value in discussion groups under rated. We argue and show that women tend to incorporate information from political discussion in their vote decisions more than men do. This serves to hurt the quality of women’s voting decisions. Women tend to believe information from political discussion partners who have an incentive to mislead them. Hence, women are more likely than men to vote for the candidate who their discussion partners prefer instead of the candidate they should prefer.
This paper’s main analysis presents the results of an original incentivized, group experiment. In the experiment, subjects are assigned positions on an abstract policy scale and they choose between two computer generate candidates who have positions on the same scale. Subjects are assigned different information levels with less informed individuals randomly assigned to better informed discussion partners. Women rely on the discussion partners in their vote decisions more than men do. This leads to poor vote decisions as they believe discussion partners who provide them with biased information. We also reanalyze a previous study which argued that political discussion can lead to worse voting decisions and demonstrate that result only occurs among women.
Chang-Gyu Kwak, Richard Feiock, “Is the text-based network method an alternative to the survey method?”
B6: Innovations in Network Measurement—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
This paper explores the extent to which differences between survey-based and text-based network are observed when they are used to measure relationship for the same network. Although the survey method is regarded most intuitive and effective way to get network data, it is limited to specific time point and responses that the survey covers. In this light, the text-based network analysis provides methodological advantages to extend the time range and the size of networks into more realistic shape. However, little attention has been paid to the methodological comparison between those two network methods. This paper tests the hypothesis that the text-based networks are similar with the survey-based networks.
Applying the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP), this paper tests the structural similarity between two local networks of intergovernmental energy sustainability collaborations in Florida in 2012. The survey asks respondents to list local entities with which the city makes an interlocal agreement for energy sustainability policy. The text-based networks are collected from the Florida newspaper archives and constructed as the semantic networks with the concept lists of energy sustainability networks. The concept lists are built from content analysis of survey questionnaire.
From the analysis, we conclude that despite the limitation in time and spatial coverage, the survey method can be critically used to check the validity of text-based network data.
YunJoo Lee, “The Effects of Communication Networks on Youth Political Participation”
C6: Social Influence and Political Opinion—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Can a person participate in politics when that person becomes old enough to vote? Youth co-exist with adult political activities and have a longing to participate in politics and to complain about what politicians do. In addition there is a longing for youth participation in politics. But so far, political participation has mostly been limited to the elections and focused on demonstration and protest. Elections require a certain age and the protests and demonstrations have a strong anti-government, anti-social character. This character makes it difficult for adolescents to participate in politics or further their political education.
Meanwhile, academic studies of the political dimension of youth participation activities have been made across various sectors. But as far as the real youth activities for political participation around behavioral practice are concerned, the concept has been defined by a mix of social participation and political participation. In addition, previous studies have a common perspective on the role as a tool for strengthening the political attitudes and political participation to be done in adulthood, rather than as a tool for analyzing the political participation of youth. But discussing the political participation levels in youth and adults using the same criteria makes it difficult to present the practical implications of political participation. Therefore, the characteristics of the process and its definition of the political participation of young people specifically are necessary.
This research defines and concentrates on the unique characteristics of the voluntary and practical policy making level of young people and all other comprehensive activities that can be defined as political participation. Therefore, in this study, youth political participation is defined to be the 'most teenagers set to influence the youth in public policy or administrative proceedings is the principal enemy practice behavior.' In addition, this study focuses on communication networks created from youth political participation, considering the collective decision-making characteristics of young people participating in politics.
Thus, the research questions of this study are as follows:
1. What is the effect of personal factors and structural factors of communication networks formed in the collective decision-making process on youth political participation?
2. What is the effect of type and development process of collective decision-making communication networks on youth political participation?
In this research, 100 children and youth from the Networks Division Youth Engagement Committee have been divided into small groups of 20 people, depending on their preferences of communication network.
We learned about the youth political participation when applied to the youth in organizations within the framework and principles. Therefore, this research intensively addressed the factors that lead to youth political participation on the basis of the elements of communication networks resulting from differences in the organization of the same group number for a small organization.
In particular, the organization structure was studied for a particular type of communication network in accordance with the Central and Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM), analyzing this structure based on the difference between individual and organizational factors that occur within the communication networks.
Then we studied the impact of individual factors and structural factors in youth political participation by using a multi-layer structure factors and analyzed the effect of organizational structural impact on individual behavior.
Philip Leifeld, Skyler J. Cranmer, “The Temporal Network Autocorrelation Model (TNAM)”
B3: Evolution of Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
In many small and medium-sized group settings, regression models are employed to explain the variation of node-level variables. Often, the variables are recorded multiple times (i.e., panel data), and the network in which this node-level variation is nested is either constant or changes over time. Examples include the performance of actors within a policy network, the democracy scores of states in the international system, and voting behavior of legislators within a parliament. To produce unbiased estimates in these cases, regression models must take into account the dependencies between actors across time. We present the Temporal Network Autocorrelation Model (TNAM), designed to model (longitudinally varying) attributes of actors in a network as a function of (temporal) endogenous dependencies and exogenous covariates. Dependencies take the form of peer influence that actors exert on other actors through the network, possibly across time and possibly in complex or indirect ways, as well as functions of the local topology of the network, such as embeddedness in cliques or triadic closure over time. The TNAM permits the specification of such dependencies in conjunction with arbitrary outcome distributions. TNAM is a generalization of the linear network autocorrelation model (LNAM), the autologistic actor attribute model (ALAAM), and the multiparametric spatio-temporal autoregressive model (m-STAR). The paper introduces and explains the TNAM, presents a case study on the diffusion of democracy, and provides details on TNAM's software implementation in the xergm package for the statistical computing environment R.
Philip Leifeld, Dana R. Fisher, Joseph Waggle, “Self-Reinforcing Recruitment Patterns in an Epistemic Community: A Network Analysis of Nominations in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment”
A5: Networks and Global Governance—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
Epistemic communities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment are international knowledge-based expert networks with a policy advice mandate. Beside their achievements, epistemic communities are sometimes criticized for biased findings and group think. Against this background, it is important to know how epistemic communities recruit new expert members in the first place -- by merit and academic excellence or rather by liking, visibility, or personal networks -- and how prior network contacts translate into co-production of expertise. We analyze a new network dataset on membership nomination patterns between members of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). The MA was composed of 1360 experts from 95 countries and was active from 2001 until final publication of the report in 2005. Relational data on who nominated whom as a new member, collaboration on the final chapters of the assessment report, and co-affiliation with international organizations, as well as attribute data on the individual members, such as home institute, nationality, gender, seniority, degree-granting institution, discipline and subject area, were collected in 2003/2004. This cross section of interactions of members at one particular point in time allows us to analyze the production processes of knowledge and policy advice of an epistemic community. Most importantly, we estimate an exponential random graph model of nomination patterns among members. The results indicate that knowledge co-production in epistemic communities and membership recruitment are governed by personal ties (same employer or university affiliation, same nationality) as much as by functional requirements (same area of expertise, seniority, natural science homophily, actual collaboration). Descriptive visualization and outdegree centrality of nodes in the reachability matrix demonstrate how some core individuals were particularly influential in shaping the overall membership composition of the group.
Debra Leiter, “Social Networks and Split Ticket Voting: A Quasi-Experiment in the 1990 German Unification Elections”
C2: Electoral Ties—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
When deciding to cast a split ticket ballot, voters in established democracies can rely on their experience with democracy and long term party attachments to guide their voting behavior. However, voters in new democracies do not have these individual level sources of information and motivation, and may instead rely on information accrued from their social networks, particularly political disagreement. Using the 1990 Cross-National Election Project German Unification election study, I examine the information sources West and East Germans use when splitting their ballot. I find that political disagreement within a social network is much more influential in decisions to cast a split ticket ballot for East German voters, while individual-level traits, particularly party attachment, play a greater role for West German voters. These findings indicate that, in absence of competition between individual-level information sources, network characteristics may have a profound impact on political decision-making.
Mariel Leonard, “Achieving Social Stability through Civil Society”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Wars of identity are statistically of longer duration and have a smaller likelihood of successful resolution than ideology- or economics-driven wars (Doyle and Sambinis 2000), due to the use of identity as a means of determining trust-worthiness and security during conflict. This dynamic continues during the peace-building process, as ethnic entrepreneurs are often specifically invited to the negotiation table. The elevation of these actors, often discredited based on their past involvement in the conflict, exacerbates distrust and institutionalizes communal wedges that reignite violently. The question becomes, once sectarian relations have broken down so far as to allow for widespread, indiscriminate violence, how do groups reestablish positive, trusting interactions?
Broadening the state-building understanding of institutions and of civil society development presents a solution to the instability and fear rampant following identity-based conflict. Civil society is rightly presented as the best option, however, civil society development as it is currently understood focuses on the facts of civil society, rather than on its mechanisms. This omission sees civil society as a 'black box,' from which trust automatically emerges, instead of actively seeking to build social capital. Emerging research demonstrates that associational life (e.g. social and professional networks) is the best, and perhaps only, means by which sustainable social capital may be developed between distrustful sectarian groups. By building associational networks and the ties of social capital connecting them, safe interaction is regularized, violence is de-normalized, and institutional participation are strengthened.
Michael Levy, Mark N. Lubell, “Innovation, Cooperation, and the Structure of Agricultural Information Networks”
B7: Innovation and Policy Learning—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Resource management policies often aim to change behavior by providing information to resource users. The diffusion of innovations has been the dominant model in agricultural policy for nearly a century, but information diffusion is unlikely to be sufficient for uptake of many innovations. When adoption costs are private but benefits are public–which is the case for many agricultural practices, especially those associated with sustainability–cooperation-dilemma dynamics are at play. Here we use exponential random graph models to identify network structures that help solve cooperation and innovation challenges. We modify Berardo and Scholz’s risk hypothesis to argue that closed structures, epitomized by triadic closure, evolve to solve cooperation dilemmas while open structures, epitomized by network centralization, evolve to solve innovation problems. We test this in three vineyard management information networks. Closed triangles were present in all three networks at levels similarly above chance. This facilitates social monitoring and helps solve the cooperation dilemma aspects of agricultural management. One network was significantly more centralized than the others, and this network has had the greatest adoption of sustainable practices, suggesting that bridging and bonding social capital must be present together for sustainable agriculture to spread. Outreach professionals who are themselves growers, but not those who aren’t, have extremely high betweenness centrality in all three networks, suggesting that they play a critical role spanning boundaries between communities.
Seunghoo Lim, Dr. Frances S. Berry, Dr. Keon-Hyung Lee, “The Battle for Heart and Minds: Constructing Longitudinal Risk Perception Sharing Networks through Policy Discourse”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Policy discourse includes the contents of ideas, the processes of interactions among policy actors, and collective interpretations. Policy discourse itself constitutes direct/indirect and tangible/intangible power by either transforming or fixing meanings. Therefore, multiple stakeholders involved in the risk policy process need to care about the words they use and resultant representations or symbols since each stakeholder’s risk perceptions are produced from words. Using a case study of Mad Cow Disease policy conflict in South Korea in 2008, this paper develops the theory of discursive narrative in policy conflicts, and compares the stakeholders’ influence and narratives using three different measures of discursive power which are exerted by stakeholders: 1) semantic power representing the converged or diverged contents of risk perceptions, 2) structural power representing the differentiated mechanisms of risk policy discourse development, and 3) interactive/constructive power representing changes in policy discourse interwined with each other’s risk perceptions. Our analysis examines four types of stakeholders: bureaucrats, interest groups, citizens and scientists. The developmental mechanisms of risk policy perceptions (categorized as amplification, persuasion, competition, and lingerer) were mediated by discursive power, rather than reflecting rational policy-learning processes. In particular, bureaucrats, who developed semantically responsive and mediating messages, seemed to be victorious over other groups in this risk policy discourse, where multiple competing policy ideas coexisted. We use semantic network analysis to study policy discourse in order to define risk policy problems according to stakeholders’ various points of view, and learn their conflicting arguments from the reciprocal persuasion processes in the policy discourse.
Alexander Loewi, “Six Degrees Made Easy: Robust Sampling of Fragile Structures”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
The question of how connected a politician is to their constituents is talked about constantly, but rarely evaluated directly. A Small World approach seems to be a natural one, but despite their enormous appeal and uniquely informative nature, empirical Small World studies are extremely rare. One important reason is the tremendous inefficiency of the route-tracing sampling methods it uses. If a path does not complete, then it has to be thrown out -- and in Dodds et. al's 2003 email experiment, for example, only 1% of the paths completed. This paper evaluates the potential of using a more robust sampling scheme, in which independently collected pieces of paths are used to estimate a transition model between population clusters. This model allows path length to be estimated for each cluster, from a random person in that cluster to the global message-passing target. The paper examines the conditions under which the model is or is not capable of accurately capturing the path length distribution.
Rodolfo Lopez, “Partisan and Coalitional Structures in a Multi-Party System: the Case of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
In this research, I investigate the partisan structure of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. Departing from most recent studies that usually serve bipartisan settings such as the US Congress, the Chilean case offers the chance to study group dynamics in a multi-party system with clear historical, organizational and ideological boundaries. Using block modeling based on structural equivalence, this paper analyzes sixteen years (1998-2014) of co-sponsorship data covering four different and consecutive legislative periods. Several important findings emerge. First, there is a constant presence of cross-partisan blocks that are organized according to a liberal to conservative ideological axis. These blocks provide empirical proof for the persistence of the theorized constrains created by the electoral system and the negotiations to reestablish the Chilean party system after the democratic restoration of 1990. Second, the stability of these blocks and the ties among them seems to generate an informal majority coalition, providing an institutional basis for political connections beyond partisan and coalitional affiliations. Finally, the results show the presence of deeper cleavages within the center-right coalition in Congress, which are unexpected in a coalition with higher degrees of ideological homogeneity and party discipline.
Jia Lu , “The Dynamics of Civil Society Emergence: A Network Analysis of Behavioral Responses after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in China”
B2: Governance and Organizational Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
While scholars in policy and planning have emphasized the theoretical significance of the civil society construct in the public sphere and its involvement in the policy decision-making process, rarely has attention been given to the dynamics of the action structure inside the civil society domain. It is thus critical to depict accurately the governing rules and the sources of agency-the active initiation of resilient behavior-from the perspective of civil society actors. This study pays particular attention to the application and execution of the social network methods to look into the relational nature of human behavior in activating collective capacity to adapt to change. I examine a self-initiating and self-evolving change process in civil society after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China. Using network data from 70 Sichuan-based earthquake recovery-oriented social groups and nongovernmental organizations, I investigated the network behavior among these civil society actors over three specified time periods: 1) before the Earthquake; 2) immediately and short-term after the Earthquake; and 3) long-term (up to three years) recovery period. I utilized the SIENA program implemented in the R statistical system to investigate longitudinally: 1) Whether there were structural tendencies that would affect specific formation patterns of network development in communication and collaboration; 2) Whether the institutional status and connection with the state actor had an effect on communication and collaboration behavior; 3) Whether there were tendencies for cross-mediation between communication and collaboration structures.
The findings demonstrated the formation of a type of proactive coping style through which newly emerged group and organizational actors took the primary role in overcoming their differences in institutional status and in re-constructing a social structural environment that nurtured the long term social capacity in dealing with extreme distress or uncertainty. The inter-group autopoietic behavior self-generated a kind of change dynamics that prompted its own structural evolution, thus showing preliminary signs of endurance and transformation.
This study illuminates the significance of the cultural-cognitive aspect of institutional formation and sustainability in order to understand the emerging process of a self-generating social support system at the informal group and formal organizational level. The study also contributed to how the concept of power can be understood by way of examining the civil society construct in times of extreme uncertainty. The network analytic method implemented in this study identifies key behavioral factors that can facilitate the policy process opening up opportunities for citizen participation and enhancing the capabilities of civil society actors. This endeavor thus sheds light to the development of policy tools to evaluate the action and behavioral outcomes of the stakeholders in the policy system dynamic, thus enhance the capacity of policymakers to be more responsive to change as well as the social and political contexts within which changes are often embedded. Data were collected in Sichuan Province during the periods, 07/2010 to 08/2010 and 02/01/2011 to 05/01/2011 with partial support from the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California.
Qinglian Lu, “Political Network and Career Mobility in a Large Bureaucratic System”
C7: Strong Network Weak Party—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
This project investigates networks and career mobility inside a large Chinese bureaucracy using multiple approaches from network analysis. Whereas mainstream studies on Chinese bureaucracy emphasize the effect of performance measures, such as regional economic growth and fiscal revenue, on career achievement of elite Chinese bureaucrats, alternative hypotheses point out the importance of political networks in bureaucratic career mobility. The effect of political networks, however, has never been systematically analyzed in the existing research on Chinese bureaucracy. Using a unique dataset, I construct longitudinal networks of Chinese bureaucrats in Jiangsu from 1990–2008. I hypothesize that network characteristics of individuals, organizations, and community profiles have significant impact on one's mobility prospect, in addition to performance measures. In particular, connections to important political sponsors increase one's mobility chances, organizational experiences serve as a filter to differentiate individuals into different career tracks, and homogeneous community composition is correlated with less career resource for individual members within the communities. Using PageRank and community detection algorithms and a discrete-time Markov chain for modeling job transitions, the evidences confirm each of the hypotheses, and the results conclusively point out that network characteristics matter more than conventional non-network aspects, such as job performance, to bureaucratic career mobility.
Matthew Maguire, “Private Business Regulation and Public Policy: A Network Approach”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Many scholars continue to view private business regulation as a threat to traditional `command and control' regulation by the state. This paper takes an alternative view, showing how private actors have used voluntary standards, not to replace government, but to drag it into policy areas that have been neglected or ignored. Looking at the development of corporate non-financial reporting regulation in Europe, the paper explores the relationship between private regulation and public policy using network methods. I argue that network analysis is useful here because it can give us a meaningful indicator of how popular voluntary standards are among companies in a given country-year. This indicator is then shown to be a powerful predictor of new public policy across a sample of 14 countries. In addition, I find that while private regulation represents a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for new public policy in this case, the arrival of new formal rules does not render voluntary standards superfluous. Instead, I find that new public policy strengthens private regulatory networks by increasing their size and rate of growth, ultimately leading to a ratcheting up of existing standards.
Todd Makse, “Legislative Networks and Revolving Door Lobbying”
C5: Lobbying and Interests—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
In recent decades, observers of Congress have devoted increasing attention to the phenomenon of the "revolving door," whereby former members of Congress and congressional staffers go on to careers in lobbying. This practice raises a number of normative concerns about unfair advantages and conflicts of interest, concerns which are perhaps most heightened when it comes to the lobbying activities of members of Congress themselves. The idea of the revolving door is a concept that naturally implicates networks, insofar as the presumed benefits of revolving door lobbying relate to the leveraging of relationships developed while in Congress. There is ample evidence that networks are relevant to the legislative process (Bratton and Rouse 2011; Fowler 2006; Kirkland 2011), so it follows that those networks could be central to the value of hiring former legislators as lobbyists. Yet while we know that central figures, such as leaders and committee chairs, are more likely to pass through the revolving door (Lazarus et al. 2013), we lack a more comprehensive understanding of how relationships developed in office impact the revolving door phenomenon. In this paper, I examine whether factors such as connectedness are relevant in post-legislative careers in the lobbying area. In particular, I examine whether these factors predict the decision to take up lobbying positions, as well as whether they impact success as a lobbyist, defined either in terms of the professional success of the individual or in terms of successful legislative outcomes.
Kacy Martin, “Factors Influencing Parental Decisions: A Social Network Analysis of School Choice in Michigan”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
The state of Michigan allows parents of students in a given public school to transfer students to a school outside of their assigned district. Particular to Michigan’s public schools, the funds for each student follow the child to their chosen school, which has financial implications for all schools involved in this competitive environment.
Parents appear to choose because of a perceived advantage of a particular educational institution. This study analyzes the decision making process in which parents participate when choosing a school for their children and how parents leverage their social networks to participate in the choice application process.
Survey data from 47 parents of preschool aged children inform this study. Parents responded to questions regarding their assigned neighborhood school, with whom they regularly interact, who they go to for information about schooling, and their reasoning for choosing their current school.
This study uses a formal influence model. Preliminary findings indicate that parents exposed to a social network of others who have chosen to send their students to schools outside of their default neighborhood schools impacts the school choice decision-making process. However, white, high SES parents are most likely to do so.
David Masad, Hilton Root, “Tangled World: an ecological model of the international system”
A8: Networks and IR theory—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
Much like species in an ecosystem, states in the international system are linked by a network of mutual influences, and adapt and change in response to them. Similarly, both biological systems and the international system have been observed to exhibit complex patterns of punctuated equilibria, with long periods of relative stability disrupted by sudden, endogenous periods of change before the system settles down into a new, stable configuration. Tangled Nature (Christensen, Collobiano, Hall and Jensen, 2002) is an individual-based model of a notional ecology that models mutual influence and coevolution, and produces the emergence of punctuated equilibria.
Our work extends the model to capture key features of the international system, such actors’ unique histories and their ability to guide their own changes. We generate notional international ecologies, and observe the dynamics they exhibit. We extract the networks of cooperation and conflict that emerge from these simulated international systems, and compare them to empirical series of alliance, trade and conflict networks. This model allows us to explore whether networked coevolution is sufficient to generate features observed in the real international system, and the role of complex interactions in it more broadly. We also use the model to argue against the view expressed by some international relations scholars that international stability requires actor homogeneity.
Anna Meyerrose, Jose A. Fortou, “Voting Networks in the European Parliament and Party Development in Central and Eastern Europe”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
What do patterns of voting among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) reveal about party system development in new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? Most comparative studies analyze party development in post-communist Europe through a domestic lens, looking at changes in the electorate, party organizations and electoral rules. Meanwhile, the work to date on MEP voting has failed to take into ac-count the endogenous effects of the voting behavior network structure. Building on these literatures, we suggest that this network at the EP level (beginning in 2004, the first year that CEE states became members of the European Union) can provide insight into the ex-tent to which party systems have been consolidated in the region. We seek to answer the-se questions by using a temporal exponential random graph model on the network of vot-ing behavior in the 2004-2009 parliaments, focusing in particular on contentious voting issues. We find that, over time, MEPs from CEE have become more likely to vote along party and party family lines, rather than along regional or national lines, and also that the network structure of voting among CEE MEPs begins to more closely resemble the struc-ture among MEPs from older, western member states. This suggests a higher degree of party system development and consolidation in the new CEE democracies than is often suggested in the comparative politics literature.
Pauline Moore, “Enter the Neighborhood Bully: Explaining the Impacts of Foreign Fighters on Rebel Group Structures and Civilian Networks ”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Scholars have recently begun to analyze the role of outsiders on rebel organizations, focusing on the conditions under which transnational insurgents enter domestic struggles, their motivations for entering, and their origins and destinations. The emergent field, however, has paid scant attention to how these outsiders might shape rebel group strategies, and how organizations relying on cadres of outsiders attempt to build long term support networks in conflict areas. Yet extant scholarship has demonstrated that local support and logistical networks play significant roles in sustaining rebel groups in conflict. Drawing on scholarship on network theories of social movements and civil wars, I argue that the introduction of foreign fighters shapes both the internal network structure of rebel organizations and the local civilian networks in which the organization operates. First, I suggest that foreign fighters are assigned different roles than their local fighter counterparts, implying that the introduction of transnational insurgents may force the organization to make strategic choices that can be detrimental to its survival. Second, I suggest that the need to create long term support networks for sustained rebellion can have significant impacts on local civilian networks, namely by creating, dissolving, and changing existing networks. This study has implications for the study of civil war, by broadening our understanding of the impact of outsiders on rebel group organization and local civilian structures.
Eric Mosinger, “Brothers or Others in Arms? Explaining Rebel Fragmentation in Civil War”
A3: Mobilizing For Violence—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
Why are some dissident groups able to forge a unified rebel front, while in other civil wars several independent rebel groups mobilize to challenge the state, and often, each other? To date, there has been little general theory or systematic empirical research in political science that seeks to answer this question. Extant scholarship often assumes that common correlates of civil war onset, such as state weakness, exploitable resources, and rough terrain, can explain multi-party civil war. Drawing on network approaches to civilian mobilization, by contrast, I develop a theory that explains rebel fragmentation in terms of how rebels interact with their civilian constituencies. Specifically, rebel mobilization capacity and widespread civilian grievances interact within preexisting civilian social networks to determine whether the rebel movement unifies or fragments. I test this theory alongside several alternatives drawn from cross-national studies of conflict within a nested mixed-methods research design. I develop a Poisson generalized estimating equation model that lends considerable credence to the role of rebel constituencies in preventing or fomenting rebel fragmentation.
Fadi Mugheirbi, Dr. Robert D Duval, “Lobbying Affiliation in Environmental Regulatory Networks”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
In this project, we describe coalitions within policy networks in the rulemaking process in two EPA programs. As a way to influence government policy, interest groups engage in coalition building and lobbying where the interest groups in fact lobby each other forming coalitions that can affect agencies’ policy decisions. However, empirical studies have generally failed to establish the causal relation between coalition lobbying and policy changes. The notable exception to this is the recent work of Nelson and Yackee (2012). Here, we build upon their approach and display the conditions under which coalition lobbying might affect rulemaking outputs. We apply the analysis of the affiliation network and blockmodeling techniques to identify different coalitions within the network. Interestingly, the degree of consensus within coalitions, the size of coalitions, and the information provided by coalitions are critical influences that affect agencies’ decisions. By utilizing an ERGM, we seek to demonstrate the effect of lobbing coalitions and their attributes on the rulemaking outputs. Accordingly, we hypothesize that the interest groups that join more consensual, larger, and informative coalitions are more likely to influence the content of rulemaking outputs. In this regard, we study two EPA programs that demonstrate different patterns of coalition lobbying: the Renewable Fuel Program (RFP) that attracts interest groups from all over the country, and the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP) that targets different geographic sites to be designated as Superfund sites. Subsequently, NCP attracts local interest groups from the targeted areas.
Hans Noel, Seth Masket, Gregory Koger, “Parties as Networks”
C5: Lobbying and Interests—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
We explore recent advances in the use of social network analysis to understand the nature of American political parties. We examine the use of SNA in uncovering hidden structures of party organizations and in identifying flows of information and money. We further note weaknesses in the current understanding of parties as networks and suggest areas for further investigation.
NOTE: This is a chapter for the Oxford University Press Handbook of Political Networks, edited by Jennifer Victor, Mark Lubell and Alex Montgomery.
Jonathan Obert, “The Vigilant Eye: Elite Control, Private Enforcement, and the American State”
B2: Governance and Organizational Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Conventional accounts of the organization of police forces by municipal governments in the United States during the middle part of the 19th Century usually treat such organization as either a byproduct of political bargaining among elite actors or as a functional response to social crisis in the city. In these accounts, the salaried, hierarchical bureaucratic police fundamentally represent a modernizing advance on traditional forms of law enforcement, such as the town constableship, since they paved the way for increasing state control over the means of violence.
Using an original dataset tracking the social network and career trajectories over 3,000 early security officers and participants in the policing system of Chicago in the 1850s, I instead argue that just as the police represented an important innovation in the public organization of coercion, this organization was not monopolistic. Instead, these forces co- emerged and co-evolved with the invention of an explicitly profit-driven private detective and security industry, with which police often cooperated and with whom they shared rules, information, and even personnel. Indeed, participants in early private detective firms in Chicago, such as the Pinkerton Agency, often held official positions as special municipal deputies, authorizing them to arrest suspects without the aid of
dedicated municipal police. Both public and private police emerged from the same traditional law enforcement institution, in which private efforts had been linked to public interest. It was only over time–as network positions among actors gradually polarized into distinct organizational clusters–that the boundaries between public and private became evident to residents of the 19th Century City.
Katherine Ognyanova, David Lazer, Michael Neblo, William Minozzi, “Drivers of young adult political identity: the role of parents, peers, and presidents”
C6: Social Influence and Political Opinion—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
The political science literature points to young adulthood as the stage in life through which enduring partisan affiliations are formed. Extant research highlights the role that parents play in shaping their children’s political and civic behavior. Another key factor known from existing studies is the perceived success of incumbent presidents during late adolescence. That perceived success (or failure) can lead to greater (lower) partisan affiliation rates among cohorts.
In this paper, we examine a distinctive panel dataset containing information about the political attitudes and behaviors of college-age participants. Over a six-year period, we track the partisanship of students in fourteen dormitories spread across nine US states. Party affiliation information is combined with self-reported full-network data about multiple social relationships among the students. The analysis finds partisanship effects of: (1) Parent affiliations; (2) Peer affiliations; (3) Presidential approval ratings prior to entry to college; (4) Presidential approval ratings during college. The study provides a comparative evaluation examining the impact that social ties and the current political environment have on partisanship.
Talha Oz, “A Study of the 113th Congress as News Commentators on Twitter”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Pundits as well as members of Congress commentate on newsworthy events selectively based on their political positions, not only on broadcast media but also on social media outlets. In this study, I introduce a method to measure this selectivity using curated tweets of Congress members. I show that political groups of the monitored members of 113th Congress can be predicted with more than 95% accuracy. In order to do this, I first create a co-commentation network where the vertices are the curated members of 113th Congress and the edge weights are the number of common newsworthy events (headlines) that they have commentated on between January 2013 and January 2015 (i.e. during 113th Congress). Then, I detect the communities by using the weighted modularity algorithm implemented in Gephi (Blondel et al. 2008). Using this method, two groups are detected when the highest modularity achieved, and 62 of the 65 monitored Congress members are found to be in the same group as their co-party members. I also show the newsworthy tweet activity of congresspeople and political groups and introduce methods to measure the politicization and political polarity of events. Our entire dataset consists of 7,376 headlines (with 3-5 paragraph long news content) published between January 2013 and January 2015 on theplazz.com news site, as well as 156,480 commentary tweets of 1442 newsmakers on these news events. All the tweets are curated manually by theplazz.com editors. Among the monitored tweets, 65 of them are from congressional members (44 of which are Senators) and all of their curated tweets (4937) on 1916 headlines are included in this study.
Sarah Parkinson, “Organizational Evolution and Repertoires of Violence in Lebanon's Palestinian Camps, 1982-1988”
A3: Mobilizing For Violence—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
How do new organizations and categories of participation emerge in war? This paper explores the co-evolution of violent repertoires, organizational configuration, and Palestinian social structures in 1980s Lebanon. Drawing on over 20 months of ethnographic, interview-based, and archival research, it uses social network theory to examine how geographic variation in wartime violence influenced formal militant structures and shaped interactions between members of militant organizations, the broader Palestinian refugee population, and external actors such as Lebanese militia members and the Syrian government.
By leveraging the concept of relational plasticity–the idea that social network ties are malleable in form, intensity, and content–this paper demonstrates how the spatialization of wartime violence in post-1982 Lebanon prompted the repurposing of quotidian relationships into the organizational realm. These processes produced divergent reconfigurations of formal organizational structures and practices, which in turn filtered back into everyday social ties. Specifically, different repertoires of violence in Beirut–initially under the Lebanese government–and South Lebanon–under the Israeli occupation–laid the groundwork for community based, inter-organizational fronts in some refugee camps while personalized factions emerged in others. These processes made new avenues for organizing militancy, interpreting community, and producing violence available.
Matthew Pietryka, Donald A. DeBats, “Is it what you have or whom you know? SES, social networks, and voting in two 19th century U.S. elections”
C8: Voting and Political Participation—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
Most models of individual-level turnout and vote choice focus entirely on individual-level explanations. Yet, few scholars would deny the importance of social influence in these decisions. Rather, most empirical approaches have been unable to measure adequately the social networks in which individual political behavior is embedded and therefore have been unable to estimate network effects. In this paper, we explore one such social mechanism–individual citizens’ social proximity to elites. We overcome the problem of measuring the social network with new-discovered poll books in 18th century Alexandria, VA and Newport, Kentucky, which reveal the names and vote preferences of all electors in each city. We supplement the polling data with detailed social profiles of all known residents in these two cities. We reconstruct the social networks of these cities using church membership records, locations of residence, familial connections, and occupations. We find that individuals more socially connected to elites turnout at a higher rate and individuals more socially connected to a given political party vote disproportionately for that party. The impact of these relationships are similar in magnitude to the effects of socioeconomic status–the predominant explanation of voting. We demonstrate that these apparent effects are robust to large amounts of latent homophily or environmental confounds. The results suggest that models failing to account for social network structure ignore an important component of variation in political behavior.
Susan Pike, “Policy Applications of Social Influence in Travel Behavior”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
This paper investigates the influence of social networks on the transportation mode choice of students and explores avenues for the inclusion of social processes as a means to address traffic and related problems. Transportation Demand Management (TDM) emphasizes the promotion of alternative modes of transportation, through the use of incentive programs such as carpool lanes or increased parking costs, in order to reduce congestion and related emissions. The promotion of alternative modes through social processes, incorporated into TDM strategies, has the potential to affect transportation outcomes and further reduce congestion and transportation emissions.
We explore transportation mode choice using traditional socio-economic, attitudinal and trip characteristic variables. Social network factors including the behaviors of close contacts are incorporated in order to investigate whether social factors influence transportation mode choice. Instrumental variables are utilized to address endogeneity concerns related to socially connected individuals making similar choices for reasons other than social influence. Our findings indicate a positive relationship between the transportation decisions made by an individual’s close social contacts and the individual’s own transportation decisions. We also find that participation in transportation programs may be linked to social learning; that is learning about transportation programs from friends (as opposed to other sources) may lead to higher levels of program participation and/or behavior change. Thus, transportation demand management programs may capitalize on social networks as an inexpensive and flexible means for the promotion of alternative modes of transportation in order to reduce congestion and transportation emissions.
Will Qiu, Paolo Parigi, “The Leopard”
C7: Strong Network Weak Party—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Using affiliation data of deputy members from 1992-2013, we suggest that the underlying structure of the Italian Parliament serves as one important but neglected explanation for how political elites in Italy such as Silvio Berlusconi are able to remain in power for long periods of time, despite the prevalence of controversy and scandal. This also suggests that the internal dynamics of the Parliament has been relatively stable despite a veneer of instability as intimated by the frequency of electoral reform in Italian politics.
Lauren Ratliff, “Political Socialization Effects on Network Selection and Influence”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Political socialization is a powerful, if not the most powerful, predictor of adult political beliefs. The childhood socialization environment should be important for our understanding of how individuals respond to political influence in the social world. In other words, socialization affects both how individuals select into and are affected by their social networks. Does the socialization environment, the political environment in which an individual is socialized into in childhood, characterize individual response to influence in the social world?
I test whether the childhood socialization environment conditions individuals’ responses to political influence in adulthood. I hypothesize that individuals raised in partisan, high-interest political environments are a) more likely to seek out supportive environments in the future and b) less likely to be influenced by the social environment in which they live and work, demonstrating homophily. Furthermore, I hypothesize that individuals raised in non-partisan or politically disengaged environments, are a) less likely to select into partisan environments and b) more likely to be influenced by others in social settings; these individuals demonstrate a higher rate of contagion.
I test these hypotheses using two data sources including the Youth Parent Socialization Study (YPSS) and an original network panel study, which allows the opportunity to study both the selection (parts a) and influence (parts b) processes. This work unites previously disparate literatures on political socialization and networks and political behavior. Finally, it begins to explore the mechanisms, or the how and why socialization conditions both the selection of and influence in social settings, such as balance theory, cognitive inconsistency, and social comparison theory, among others.
Armando Razo, “Comparative Analysis of Political Networks”
C1: Clientelism and Governance—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
What is the utility of network analysis to the subfield of comparative politics? How can comparativists incorporate a network-analytic approach to their existing theoretical and methodological toolsets? These are important questions to ask because the subfield of comparative politics has long recognized the importance of various relational phenomena but is only beginning to pay systematic attention to political networks proper. To answer these questions, the essay is organized in three parts. First, the essay reviews major themes in comparative politics such as state-society relations, among many others, that are essentially relational, and hence ripe for network analysis. Second, the essay reviews recent comparative work with a focus on clientelistic networks and policy networks in non-democratic settings. Finally, from a methodological perspective, the essay discusses the major challenge of comparing networks across countries in order to bring a truly comparative dimension to a relational study of domestic politics.
Jacob Reidhead, “Two Factions, Two Fates: The Success and Failure of Regional Integration by South Korean Political Parties”
C7: Strong Network Weak Party—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
In South Korea during the early 1990s, a series of electoral reforms opened thousands of regional political offices to election by popular vote. The opening of these positions created enormous opportunities for political organization at the regional level and quickly sparked competition between central party elites and regional political networks for control over the national political parties and seats in the National Assembly. In the ensuing two decades, this central-regional competition played out differently across South Korea’s two major political factions. Conservative elites managed to maintain discipline of their party by co-opting regional politicians in those regions loyal to conservatives. Progressive elites failed to maintain discipline of their party and lost control of progressive seats in the National Assembly to regional networks in progressive regions. Organizational theories of multi-tier patronage, from political sociology, and contracting versus vertical integration, from economics and economic sociology, provide insights into the success and failure of regional political integration across multiple levels of political offices.
This study is the first step in a broader research agenda to explore both the causes and effects of regional political integration. This initial study establishes the phenomenon as described and conducts a preliminary analysis of causal factors within the political system. A second study will explore the relevance of kinship, civic, and professional ties to multi-tier political organization. A third study will explore the unintended consequences of partial reform and illustrate the ironic de-liberalizing of a national political system that ensues when some parties decentralize and others do not.
Jack Reilly, “A Networked Agent Based Model of Cultural Diffusion”
B3: Evolution of Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
Previous computational modeling work has shown cultural and ideological diffusion to act quickly to produce zones of homogenous polarized cultures that have difficulty interacting with each other. Yet we do not always observe large zones of cultural homogeneity in the real world. Rather, we witness interesting variation in homo- and heterogeneity across and within different world populations and cultures. I argue that one of the key features left out of previous models of culture is the role of network structure and communication barriers in shaping the flow of information between individuals and groups. Accounting for this structure allows for the greater applicability of culture models to understanding any number of modern cultural and ideological phenomena, including ideological polarization, social communication, and cultural drift. I introduce a new culture model embedded in a more complex network structures and replicate and extend previous simulations to show that different structure does, in fact, change the equilibrium conditions of the model and make it more representative of the world we observe empirically. This finding suggests that we should not take network structure lightly in our research when examining patterns of political communication, culture, and conflict.
Matt Robbins, Mark Lubell, “The evolution of social networks in collaborative natural resource governance”
B1: Environmental Policy Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
A key question in political science is how political networks evolve over time. Our research analyzes the evolution of the network of stakeholders in the Caribbean spiny lobster fishery of Honduras over the course of the Spiny Lobster Initiative (SLI). The SLI was a conservation and development program promoting ecologically and socially sustainable fisheries by establishing the foundations of collaborative governance. The social network of spiny lobster fishery stakeholder organizations was sampled three times over five years, yielding a unique longitudinal sample with which to analyze network dynamics. Differing theoretical perspectives from the social capital literature yield the competing hypotheses that over time, the network exhibits a) increased overall density, indicating a higher overall level of connectivity between organizations or b) little to no increase in network density, but instead a realignment of ties to create more boundary-spanning relationships among stakeholder organizations. Results of ERG modeling, brokerage analysis and descriptive statistics are consistent with the increased boundary-spanning hypothesis. Our findings have practical and theoretical implications for the institutional design of collaborative development projects.
Derek Ruths, “Network-based models of the worldview of news organizations”
B5: Online Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
People and groups behave, in large part, according to the beliefs they hold about the world. A great deal of ongoing work focuses on understanding how beliefs and, more generally, interpretations of events affect a diverse array of phenomena including radicalization, rule-following, and filter bubbles. In this talk, we present a first attempt at using computational methods to mine online data and model the worldview of different news organizations. In this particular project, we define worldview as the organization's beliefs about how different national and subnational actors present in the world relate to one another. Using a novel computational framework, we show how the way in which different news organizations cover events reveals systemic differences in their view (or postured view) of world events.
Virginia Sampson, “Configurations and Influences of Messy Governance Networks”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Studies that explore how governance or policy networks are configured and influence performance are starting to emerge. Networks are widely recognized as crucial to social influence or contagion models (Robins, Lewis & Wang, 2012), not just in terms of the strength of ties between people or groups, but also in the structure of these ties across an entire network and their role in knowledge and resource exchange and policy adoption (Rogers, 2003; Valente, 1995; Considine and Lewis, 2008; Robins, Lewis & Wang, 2012). This paper aims to classify the types of network configurations, and how different characteristics influence their performance. The first phase will build upon the macro- and micro- conceptual frameworks proposed by Provan and Kenis (2011) and Koliba Meek & Zia (2011) to compare the structural, functional, and actor characteristics that make up governance or policy network configurations, and whether a typology of thick and thin types can emerge. The second phase contributes to a theoretical foundation for how network features (e.g., trust, reciprocity, density) and configurations of bounded networks may influence their performance (Abrams, Cross & Levin, 2004; Burt, 2005; Krackhardt, 1994). The results will contribute to development of research designs that apply conceptual frameworks with a configuration approach to examine which configurations are more effective in achieving their mission. The results will also contribute to an emerging sub-field of governance network theory that begins to integrate separate disciplines and classify the interdependent relationships between micro-level individual behavior, meso-level network structure, and macro-level institutional outcomes.
Anastasia Shesterinina, “Why Risk? : Social Structures and Mobilization in Civil War”
A3: Mobilizing For Violence—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 2:30pm–4:00pm
Why do individuals mobilize to fight in civil war? Recent research points to a common conclusion: Seemingly competing explanatory factors affect mobilization decisions under some conditions but not others and for some individual trajectories but not others. This paper draws on eight months of fieldwork with participants and non-participants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992-1993, focusing on three mobilization trajectories at the stage of civil war onset to explain why individuals mobilize to fight in the conditions of high risk and uncertainty. It advances a threat framing mechanism that shows how social structures affect individual mobilization decisions and when rationalist or norm-based logics of action prevail in these conditions. The paper argues that at the time of uncertainty presented by civil war onset, micro-, meso-, and macro-level networks within which individuals are embedded channel uncertainty into mobilization by framing threat. Whether threat is perceived toward oneself or one’s collectivity then translates into lower-risk, rationalist or higher-risk, norm-based action respectively. This research contributes to central debates in the literature on the effects of social structures on civil war mobilization and our understanding of ordinary people’s decisions in situations of crisis.
Aaron Shreve, “Arming for Respect: How Status Inconsistency Affects Arms Buildups.”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Most states have an independent military force. One reason why states buildup their military strength is security. I suggest states increase arms for another reason: status and prestige. Specifically, I argue states engage in arms buildups when they are status inconsistent. The two main types of status are achieved status – the position of a state based on its own achievements – and ascribed status– the position given to a state by other states. Status inconsistency (SI) occurs when achieved and ascribed status are incongruent. I add to the status and SI literature by making two points. First, SI can have both conflictual and cooperative effects on state behavior. Second, the effects of SI are conditional on the direction of change in SI and the duration of SI. This paper focuses on the effects of SI on conflictual behavior, specifically arms buildups. SI motivates states to avoid or assuage their position through engaging in arms buildups for several reasons, First, states that desire to change the international system may believe that military power is shortcut to prestige and a reordering of the system. Second, arms buildups are visible, which is necessary to build ascribed status since other states grant ascribed status. Third, increasing arms may enhance leverage over other states, which in turn increases ascribed status by improving the state’s bargaining position. I use a state’s position in a network to operationalize status and empirically test the relationship between SI and arms buildups.
Amy Erica Smith, “When Political Talk Is Pillow Talk: How Gender Empowerment Shapes Political Discussion between Spouses Cross-Nationally”
C2: Electoral Ties—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Occasional discussions of politics in everyday interactions with friends and family constitute at once perhaps the lowest cost form of political participation, and an important mechanism for mobilizing citizens into more costly forms of participation, from voting to civic activism. Among women, talking politics with spouses and partners might help level widely-documented gender disparities in information and political engagement; yet it could possibly lead to lower interest among women with few discussion partners and who disagree politically with their spouses. I examine political discussion among married/partnered women and men across 17 countries studied in the Comparative National Elections Project. Married women report more political discussion with spouses and less with non-spouses than do the married men interviewed; yet they are less likely to say their spouse supports their own candidate, and more likely to report uncertainty. While all spousal political discussions–whether agreeing or disagreeing–are associated with higher political interest for men, encountering disagreement with spouses demobilizes women. Examining patterns across countries, I find that in more developed countries and ones with higher levels of gender empowerment, women are more likely to prefer their spouses as discussion partners, yet they are less demobilized when they encounter disagreement.
David Smith, Anne Washington, John Wilkerson, “Attacking the Code: A Computational Approach to Discovering Issue Networks in Congress”
B6: Innovations in Network Measurement—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
The US Code is the compilation of current laws and the main source of federal government authority. When members of Congress propose legislation, they often amend the Code to alter the authority of specific agencies or programs. We propose a methodology for discovering what parts of the Code lawmakers "attack" with their legislative proposals. By automatically identifying references to provisions of the Code in legislation, we build a network based on the similarity of provisions found in members' bills. In addition to making linkages among members, we are also able to investigate which aspects of existing government authority are being attacked by different networks. By training supervised classifiers on legislative metadata, we will also infer bills' objectives -- repeal, revision, or extension -- toward current statutory authority.
Steven Snell, “Picking Politics at Church”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Previous research demonstrates that congregations are an important political network for religious Americans, exerting an influence on vote choice and political attitudes. Nevertheless, the literature is plagued by the possibility of self-selection: congregations may have a direct influence on individual political behavior or religious choice may be largely endogenous to political predispositions. The present work engages this larger question by asking to what extent religious Americans use political criteria to choose a congregation. Drawing on national samples I assess the extent to which survey respondents say that political motivations informed their selection of a congregation. I consider whether rates of self-selection vary across religious traditions, especially those in which ``church shopping'' is more socially acceptable. Given the relatively low rates at which congregants say that they use political criteria to select a congregation, I also bring to bear on the question original data from a list experiment, which allows respondents to anonymously indicate whether or not their choice of congregation was motivated by political preferences. Finally, I supplement this survey data with rich contextual data. I examine how the county-level religious landscape, as reported in the Religious Congregations and Membership Data, and the political makeup of the community contribute to religious Americans' decision to affiliate with a political congenial or uncongenial congregations.
Jennifer Spindel, “Logistics of Ballistics: Power and Politics in the Global Missile Network”
A1: Arms Trade—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
Who proliferates and why? Extant scholarship focuses heavily on the potential effects of weapons transfers. For example, scholars have sought to understand the relations created and sustained by weapons transfers and the effects on conflict dynamics such as regional and enduring rivalry, superpower competition, and strategy in war, as well as alliance yoking and foreign policy coordination. These analyses focus on the downstream effects of weapons rather than the structure of the network itself. I argue that scholars need to examine the politics that led to the creation of weapons flows – in essence, to study the nodes rather than ties – in order to explain the movement of weapons.
This paper combines data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) with original research to show that careful examination of global missile transfers as a network can shed light on the politics of weapons movement. Methodologically, I show that network centrality, density, and brokerage offer greater leverage in explaining both the transfer of weapons and important conflict processes than prior explanations. Additionally, I show that my findings partially reflect the battlefield uses of missile technology; they affect casualties, the onset and duration of war, the possibility of negotiation, and overall strategy and tactics. In examining missiles and the larger network structure, this paper contributes to our understanding of weapons transfers and demonstrates the advantages of a relational perspective in explaining the motivations for weapons technology transfers.
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, Delia Mocanu, Alessandro Vespignani, James Fowler, “Spontaneous Protest Mobilization”
B5: Online Political Networks—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
This paper tests presents the first empirical comparison of elite and non-elite mechanisms of protest mobilization. Using 14 million geocoded tweets and data on Arab Spring protests in 16 countries, this paper shows that protest mobilization occurs through diffuse, self-organized action of normal individuals; elites have no discernible impact on future protests. To reach this conclusion, a computer reads each tweet and develops a coordination measure based on the content of that tweet; the author of each tweet is also categorized as elite or not based on a variety of threshold measures of influence. Aggregated to the country-day level, these coordination and elite measures are connected to protests using a machine-coded dataset. Our model find strong, consistent support for mass mobilization and none for elite-led mobilization. This result is verified with a hand-coded protest dataset, alternative measures to identify elite accounts, and restricting the measures to only Arabic language tweets. The use of geocoded tweets means this activity occurs in the countries that underwent protest; simple as that sounds, analyses of social media and the Arab Spring have not been able to talk about Twitter in the Arab Spring countries because samples were not restricted to specific locations. Second, studies of individuals have relied on post-hoc survey data. These data, expensive to collect, cover many fewer individuals than our data, are of more limited durations, and can only provide insight into behaviors about which the questions ask. Third, works that traces the protest events themselves are qualitative in nature and therefore limited to one or two countries. Our data permit the study of mobilization processes at high levels of temporal resolution simultaneously across countries, a fundamentally new level of analysis.
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, “Online and Offline Activism in Egypt and Bahrain”
A7: Protest, Conflict, and Network Ties—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Though academics have extensive theories about elites' strategies to mobilize individuals, no one has theorized about what these elites do during protests. If overthrowing a regime were only a matter of getting bodies in the street, no government would last long. Instead, regimes' ouster requires sustained demonstrations composed of different groups that do not fold in the face of tear gas, rubber bullets, or worse. This paper develops a substitution theory of activists' behavior. Activists, the elites who try to organize policy change through protests, will work to convince others that the regime is not popular and upcoming protests will have high levels of attendance. Once protest starts, they substitute this behavior for the kinds of activity: battling police, coordinating support, and providing information updates to bystanders. The theory is then tested using using the entire tweet history of 19 activists' accounts in Bahrain and Egypt from January 10th, 2011 through April 10th, 2011. A support vector machine model shows that activists engage primarily in rhetorical production aimed at convincing others to protest; little work is given to coordinating protests or battling the state. Topic analysis further shows that issues salient to activists are not relevant to the larger population, and those salient to the larger population are not relevant to activists. Activists therefore play an essential role in starting protests but not in their continuing operation.
Mariela Szwarcberg, “Distributive Politics and Network Analysis”
C1: Clientelism and Governance—Multnomah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
Studying how political parties and party brokers build a constituency, current studies on distributive politics and clientelism have focused on the strategies political actors choose to mobilize voters, as well as on the type of voters that are targeted with particularistic goods (see e.g. Kitshchelt and Wilkinson 2007, Stokes 2005, Nichter 2008, Calvo and Murillo 2012, Weitz-Shapiro 2012, Stokes et al. 2013 Gans-Morse et al. 2014). Yet, most of the literature have failed in paying attention to what and how is being distributed through clientelistic networks. Using network analysis, this paper shows that studying what is being distributed thought these networks contributes to solve key questions about programmatic and non-programmatic distributive strategies, and core and swing voters. I test the theories advanced in this paper by using original evidence from Argentina.
Andrew Therriault, “Contagious Turnout At Scale: Household Networks and Participation in the DNC Voter File”
C8: Voting and Political Participation—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
For the vast majority of voters, the most salient political networks are the ones within their own households, but researchers have often struggled in their attempts to understand these networks' dynamics and their impacts on participation. The fundamental problem faced by most studies of networks and participation---that social networks are built on homophily, proximity, and other potentially-conflating factors---is particularly difficult to address in studies of household networks. Sorting out the variety of potential causal linkages is difficult in any observational context, and in most cases, the limitations of available data make this goal all but impossible to achieve. In this context, I present a new and highly-unique source of data for studying household networks: the Democratic National Committee's voter file, which has historically been off-limits to outside researchers.
The DNC voter file is the most comprehensive available, with regular updates in all fifty states and individual turnout histories going back to the 1990s. What really distinguishes our file, though, is in the way we track changes over time. Since 2007, every single addition, deletion, and modification has been recorded individually, and these records allow us to witness the evolution of households and behavior across elections. Using millions of unique observations, we can look at the political impacts of changes to household compositions from marriage, separation, death, graduation, military service, and other major life events, to get a clearer view of the impacts of parents, children, partners, and others on individual participation. My presentation will share our findings to date, discuss how we use these results to predict future behavior, and invite interested participants to propose their own ideas for future collaboration.
Paul W. Thurner, Skyler Cranmer, Goeran Kauermann, Christian Schmid, “The international trade of arms: A Network Approach ”
A1: Arms Trade—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
The international trade of arms constitutes a network of exporting and of importing countries and of intermediary traders. The resulting structure is complex and reveals highly interesting latent patterns. Unfortunately, there are only very few studies investigating these relations using a network approach. Based on SIPRI’s exhaustive data set on major conventional weapons, we provide a theory-oriented description of these time series focusing, inter alia, on fragmentation/segmentation, density and centralities. Second, we apply cross-sectional and temporal exponential random graph models (TERGMS) for binarized networks. We propose new specifications/transformations for endogenous network structures, and we include node- as well as relation-specific attributes (membership in alliances, GDP, military expenditures, embargoes, similarity of regimes etc.) as explanatory variables. Our analyses indicate, e.g., a continuous decrease of the impact of alliances. In order to assess the predictive performance of our model we rely on out-of-sample forecasting.
Andrey Tomashevskiy, “Friends and Partners: Inferring the Global Friendship Network”
A6: Alliances—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
The notion "friendship" among countries is central in studies of international relations. The notion of friendship is implicit in theories of alliances, conflict and rivalry. However, friendship among states cannot be directly observed using existing data. Although measures such as alliances or trade serve as imperfect proxies to friendship or affinity among countries, it is not possible to treat such data as direct representations of friendship. In this paper, I use dimensionality reduction and machine learning techniques to infer and recover the latent friendship network. These techniques leverage the abundance of monadic and dyadic state-level data to estimate a similarity function and evaluate the presence or absence of friendship between pairs of countries. Using existing trade, alliance, IGO membership and other dyadic and monadic data, I use association network inference tools to predict friendship links among countries and present an estimate of the latent global friendship network in the post-WW2 period. With these data, I study the evolution of the friendship network over time. I find that the structure of this network has changed over time to become less hierarchical in the post-Cold War period. This paper is the first to explicitly consider friendship in a network context and presents a novel approach to conceptualize affinity and friendship in international relations.
Oren Tsur, David Lazer, “Semantically Coordinated Networks in the Political Domain ”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
Party discipline is of great interest for political scientists. Typically, party discipline is examined by analysis of roll call votes. Discipline, however can be also measured by adherence to party lines in talking points and agenda setting campaigns. Discipline, therefore, can be captured by conformity of language in public statements and social media streams. In this work we build political networks based on semantic similarity. We use machine learning algorithms (topic models) in order to identify the different topics discussed in the political discourse, then construct networks and detect communities based on semantic similarity in the various discovered topics. We further use ngram analysis as a proxy for recovering talking points and model the discipline on the party and the individual level. The semantically coordinated networks that were learned automatically are compared to explicit networks based on roll call votes, committee membership and public statements released jointly. Initial results show that Republicans tend to be more disciplined than Democrats, however, each party is more disciplined in the topics it own.
Patrick Tucker, “A Constituent-Level Analysis of Home Style”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
While studies of representation often focus on policy congruence between voters and elites, the relationship between the two sets of actors is not limited to ideological alignment. Rather, legislators engage in non-policy activities to win favor with those voters who may be unreachable with respect to policy. In particular, legislators build "home style" networks through their direct contacts with their constituents. By partaking in "home styles" that highlight their most favorable attributes, members of Congress attempt to alter the dimensions of representation on which they are evaluated. Although much work on home style captures how and why legislators engage in their particular strategies, little is understood about how voters react to such behavior. In this paper I use original data from The American Panel Survey to that as the frequency and level of intimacy of contact with the legislator increases, citizens' evaluations of their relationship improve.
Jennifer Victor, Gregory Koger, “Financing Friends: Legislators, Lobbyists, and the Pervasive Influence of Campaign Finance”
C5: Lobbying and Interests—Multnomah Falls, Saturday, 9:00am–10:30am
In this paper we seek to explain the purpose of campaign contributions. Prior research finds that campaign contributions do not buy votes, but they can buy access to lawmakers. Rather than conceptualize donations as a single-shot exchange of money for time, we see campaign donations as both an investment in an ongoing relationship and an expression of common underlying characteristics between lobbyists and legislators. Lobbyists, we argue, make donations to develop and maintain relationships with allied legislators. We test our idea on the bipartite matrix of lobbyist-legislator relationships from the 109th Congress (2005-2006) in the House and Senate. Using the one-mode projection of legislators (connected by common lobbyist donations) we use a variety of statistical tests to ascertain whether legislators are more likely to vote the same way when connected by common lobbyists. Evidence supports our expectations in the House, but not the Senate and we speculate about why that may be the case.
Paul Wagner, Diane Payne, “Socialization or Social Selection - Cooperation patterns in Irish climate change policymaking”
B1: Environmental Policy Networks—Elowah Falls, Friday, 9:00am–10:30am
Stakeholders engage in participative inter-organisational policymaking processes in a variety of different ways, for an array of normative reasons, and for a range of instrumental purposes. Understanding exactly which factors shape the actions of stakeholders in a policymaking process is important as it can help explain why we observe particular structural characteristics in a network. This information is useful because it can help decision-makers design strategies to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the policymaking process. In this paper, we are interested in identifying whether stakeholders in the Irish climate change policy network are more likely to form ties based on status homophily or based on value homophily. We test these two competing hypothesizes by developing and comparing two Bayesian exponential random graph models, each of which postulating one of the these two forms of homophily as a significant predictor of tie formation Our results show that stakeholders are significantly more likely to form ties based on status homophily than they are to form ties based on value homophily. Interpreting our results, we argue that the Irish climate change policy network is fragmented into a number of interdependent subsystems, within each of which a subset of actors that share a common social characteristic engage in the debate over the issues about which they have specialized knowledge. This leads us to argue that the ability of the Irish government to mange climate change will depend on how well they are able to coordinate the complex actions and interactions among and between the subsystems in the network.
Christoher Weare, Christopher Weare, Thomas Valente, “From Publication to Policy: How Research Gets Translated into Practice”
B7: Innovation and Policy Learning—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Our paper analyzes the pathways that link academic research to application in policy and practice through bibliometric analysis. It focuses on anti-tobacco policy, where policy makers are directed to apply “the most current research and findings”, yet we still understand little concerning how and when research gains policy-makers’ attention. Existing work on research use in the policy process focuses on the demand side, how government organizations and decision makers make use of research findings. We propose that this work needs to be augmented by a dramatically different, though complementary, analysis of the research-policy link that focuses on the supply side. This paper examines the networked characteristics of research - its location within the larger research field, its relationship to other work, and the citation pathways that link policy relevant work to more basic findings – and seeks to identify particular characteristics that are related to the use of research by policy makers.
We are conducting a comprehensive search of tobacco studies, tobacco policy documents, and tobacco reports to build a database of articles that represent the field of tobacco control research, including articles that connection between basic research and policy. We are constructing multiple networks including co-author, co-citation and direct citation networks that reflect different manifestations of scholarly and policy interactions and permit the testing of specific hypotheses. We will then apply theories of the diffusion of innovations and the use of research in policy to the tobacco control field to understand which research studies have been translated into policy actions.
Steven Wilson, “Networks, Protest, and Euromaidan: Social Media Networks and the Ukrainian Protests”
B8: Social Media, Social Protest—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 4:00pm–5:30pm
From February 18th to 20th of 2014, Ukrainian citizens entered the streets of Kiev in numbers not seen since the Orange Revolution of 2005. The purpose of this paper is to use a massive new dataset compiled from Twitter (some 2 billion geocoded tweets) to test hypotheses based on classic theories of social networks and protest. As a case study, the paper uses Ukraine's Euromaidan protests in order to demonstrate that mass protests can be both detected and their size estimated, purely from social media data. The approach is language neutral and grounded in network analysis, which allows for the real-time detection of mass protest even in regions and cities not covered by traditional media.
Stefan Wojcik, David Lazer, Brooke Foucault Welles, Waleed Meleis, Christoph Riedl, Jefferson Hoye, “Performing Political Network Experiments with Volunteer Science”
A4: Poster—Willamette Ballroom, Friday, 6:00pm–7:30pm
The internet has fundamentally changed social experimentation by making it easier and cheaper to create, manage, run, and analyze large-scale social experiments. However, existing online experimental research uses customized software integrating with specific, pre-defined subject pools such as Mechanical Turk to perform single experiments. The weakness of this decentralized, ad hoc approach to online experimentation is a continued dependence on specific subject pools and a continuous re-invention of the wheel as every lab must solve the same challenges in design, recruitment, and management. To address these, we created Volunteer Science (www.VolunteerScience.com) as a platform for performing experiments using volunteers online. Since 2014, over 20,000 volunteers have participated in roughly 40,000 experiments and surveys. And we have validated it for survey-based and inter-personal interaction studies. Here we introduce the platform, describe how we have validated diverse methods from across the social sciences, and discuss how we and others have performed experiments on social networks for the study of political communication, problem solving, and deliberation.
Stefan Wojcik, “ShinyNetSurvey: An Interactive Network Survey Built on RShiny”
B6: Innovations in Network Measurement—Elowah Falls, Saturday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Surveys of network ties are often time-consuming and produce cognitive fatigue as respondents are forced to recall a large number of alters in different networks. We introduce a digital network survey program written exclusively for measuring network ties that takes minimal time and cognitive effort from the respondent. We do so by integrating a graphing function, a search function, and background data-collection routines to create a user-centric survey that is fast, easy, and provides a large amount of data on network features. The program is particularly suitable for busy populations such as legislative staff or businesspeople. In initial field tests, users provided more links than pen-and-paper surveys in less time.
Jungmoo Woo, “Oil Exit Costs, Prior Intervention and Onset of Civil War”
A2: Decision-Making and Conflict—Wahkeena Falls, Friday, 11:00am–12:30pm
Prior studies on the relationship between oil and the onset of civil war argue that oil increases the likelihood of civil war by either improving rebel leaders’ financial capability to mobilize or by weakening state apparatuses. However, it is not clear why some states have not experienced civil wars despite the influence of oil. This article advances a theory of oil trade ties, prewar intervention, and civil war onset. While oil is a primary energy source in most states, there are a few oil exporters in the international oil market. Because of this, the costs of breaking an oil trade tie are greater for oil importers vis-à-vis oil exporters. This gives oil ex leverage over oil importers, which encourages the latter to support oil exporters who have political instability problems. This is because the onset of civil conflict in exporting states threatens oil trade ties, and oil importers can expect to bear significant costs for such a break. Given this, I hypothesize that oil trade ties will increase the likelihood of prewar intervention in exporting states to support the government, and the support will reduce the likelihood of civil war onset in exporting states. I test this hypothesis using network analysis to measure the level of oil exporters’ leverage and logit model to capture the theoretical processes of interest. Analyses find considerable support for the idea that prewar intervention increases as an oil exporting states centrality in the oil network increases, and that the likelihood of civil war subsequently decreases, particularly in states, which experience support for the government.
Paul Zachary, Joseph Brown, Gordon McCord, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday: Northern Ireland Churches as Instruments for the Effect of Pre-War Ethnic Diversity on Violence”
A7: Protest, Conflict, and Network Ties—Wahkeena Falls, Saturday, 2:00pm–3:30pm
Does ethnic diversity affect patterns of political violence? Previous answers to this question can be divided into two competing predictions. In the first, ethnic diversity increases inter-ethnic social capital by mixing an individual's social network. This decreases the probability of violence. In the second, diversity cements ethnic cleavages and has no effect on individuals' social networks, which increases the probability of violence. To test these competing empirical predictions, we use the location of churches built before the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as geospatial instrumental variables. As people choose to live near the church they attend, this enables us to measure the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the social network of a block's inhabitants. Church attendance, moreover, is also a good predictor of a person's side during the Troubles, enabling us to uncover the effect of diversity on local levels of violence. Using this measure, we show that diversity causes an increase in violence.
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Key Dates
March 11 – Deadline for Paper Proposals and Fellowships
April 27 - Early Registration ends
May 15 - Last day to reserve hotel room
June 9 - Last day to register