11:05 am
Governance Robustness & Resilience
Dimitris Christopoulos | MU-Vienna & Heriot-Watt Scotland | Austria
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Dimitris Christopoulos | MU-Vienna & Heriot-Watt Scotland | Austria
Relations between agents (i.e. networks) act as conduits to their political power. And power is channeled to the attainment of governance outcomes. Traditional social science makes the simplifying assumption that actor preferences (their perceived utility) can be employed to predict their behavior. By comparison an analysis of networks makes actor interdependence the point of departure to an understanding of their constraints and opportunities. In that respect actors can impact outcomes not only through their own discrete interventions, but also mediated by the pattern of interaction among others.
Governance as the product of political exchange is therefore affected by the quality of the interaction between political agents, what Jones et al. (1997) and Robins et al. (2011) have termed governance embeddedness. For instance, the degree to which political agents reciprocate relations equitably, whether there is transitivity, and whether relations are predominantly hierarchical. Governance as a process is affected by the pattern of exchange between political actors. For instance, the degree to which there is a strong core-periphery, the multiplicity of clusters, prevalence of brokers or the skewness in the distribution of ties can affect the way politics is exercised and policies are created.
I employ a range of case studies of policy making, policy implementation and cross-border policy in Europe, to demonstrate how governance process and governance outcomes are affected by the networks of political agents. This often happens in ways that can only be comprehended by analyzing the pattern of actor relations. I also use examples that draw from cases of environmental policy and the recent debates on sustainability to hypothesize on the nature of governance robustness & resilience. This analysis is coached within the literature of leadership, political entrepreneurship and brokerage or what has been termed, exceptional agency.
11:25 am
Conflicts as Networks of Event Orderings
Ronald Breiger | University of Arizona | United States
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Ronald Breiger | University of Arizona | United States
Julia Smith | University of Arizona | United States
There has recently been increased interest in theorizing a greater diversity of networks, and in particular in using network analysis to exploit relations between events and the attributes, actions, and variables that can be used to characterize them. In this paper we advance this line of inquiry with respect to insurgencies, an important example of collective action within a political context. One productive way to analyze an insurgency is to view it as a network of sequenced variables across stages (periods) of the conflict. Reanalyzing data that has informed policy considerations from a RAND Corporation study of the thirty most recently completed insurgencies, we construct a network of insurgencies as a means of measuring the degree of overlap among their sequenced activities. The network among insurgencies is informative in identifying sequences of events that predict outcomes of interest, and aids in the identification and analysis of anomalous cases. We explore this formulation, point out some of its limitations, and present illustrative analysis demonstrating how new and useful insights can be obtaining by combining our formal approach with one grounded in the comparative analysis of case studies.
11:45 am
The duality of issues and organizations: A network approach to the exploration of collective agendas
Mario Diani | University of Trento | Italy
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Mario Diani | University of Trento | Italy
This paper proposes a 2-mode network approach to the study of the way in which issues addressed by interest organizations combine in broader collective agendas and guide collective action. It posits that the meaning of specific issues is best captured if they are explored in the light of their connections to other public issues, i.e., as part of broader agendas. The paper explores networks of issues created by the priorities of citizens organizations in three different urban contexts, Bristol and Glasgow (Diani 2015) and Cape Town (Diani, Ernstson, and Jasny 2015). Diani, Mario. 2015. The Cement of Civil Society: Studying Networks in Localities. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Diani, Mario, Henrik Ernstson, and Lorien Jasny. 2015. “Modes of Coordination in Civic Fields: A Comparative Perspective on South Africa and UK.” Sunbelt Conference, Brigthon, UK.
12:05 pm
The role of personal networks along institutional ventures. Insights from the Bolivian case.
Patricia Cabero Tapia | Technische Universität Berlin | Germany
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Patricia Cabero Tapia | Technische Universität Berlin | Germany
The notion of institutional entrepreneurship focuses attention on the manner in which interested actors work to influence their institutional contexts, through different strategies such as technical and market leadership or lobbying for regulatory change. By adopting different strategies, institutional entrepreneurs diffuse new practices using established networks and resources, and drawing effectively on existing institutional elements and models to craft new systems. While it is widely acknowledged that institutional change flows through personal and professional linkages, little is known about what kind of networks are associated with what kind of outcomes during the development of an institutional venture and how these networks evolve along an institutional project.
To shed light on these questions, the analysis of this study is built on ego network data from institutional entrepreneurs of two initiatives, which are fostering the diffusion of information technologies in Bolivia. The first case is about the SIM group, which promotes the development of world-class skills in computer sciences and programming for students in Bolivia, through the organization of yearly international programing contest since 2006. About 1500 students from 17 universities across Bolivia have participated in these contests in 2015. The other case is about the Software Libre (SL) groups. These groups have promoted the adoption of SL throughout the Bolivian state. As a result of the actions of the SL groups, the Bolivian Decree 1793 defines a time frame of seven years to complete the migration to SL of all governmental bodies. These groups constituted an ideal setting to study the dynamics around an institutional project, as they allowed for exploring: how ego networks of group members from the SIM and SL are affecting the diffusion patterns of information technologies in Bolivia.
In this paper, my approach is to advance our understanding of the role of personal networks of institutional entrepreneurs using the small group as the unit of analysis. Personal networks are analyzed in their composition, that is the distribution of actor attributes in the network, and their structure, that is the pattern of relationships within a network. The analysis is performed at individual and group level.