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19 September 2007

Networks in political science

I have been meaning to write about the incipient rise of network ideas within political science since the political science (APSA) meetings over Labor Day weekend. There has always been a (very) thin thread of network ideas within the discipline. The most robust has been on political behavior, most notably the work by Robert Huckfeldt, John Sprague, and collaborators, and Samuel Patterson wrote about networks in legislatures. And there has always been a networky component of the federalism literature, e.g., in Jack Walker’s work on diffusion among states. And of course, the recent work from Robert Putnam on social capital has a relational foundation. Recent years have definitely witnessed an uptick in network-related publications in political science, but nowhere is this trend more evident than at APSA. As a point of comparison, back in the mid 90s, there would be at most a handful of network-related papers (some years, just me, I believe). This year, I am guessing there were 50-60. This included a thematic panel to lead off the conference, with Michael Heaney, John Scholz, Scott McClurg, John Padgett, Christopher Ansell, James Fowler, Sarah Reckhow and myself.

I will note that those of us on the thematic panel met after to talk about what we could do to catalyze the network agenda within political science. Approaches like this face a particular challenge within political science because of the fairly rigid division of the discipline into subfields across which there is relatively little communication. Thus, cross-subfield methods and theories face a critical mass problem. It’s not insurmountable, but it does require some self conscious efforts to get the ball rolling.

Anyhow, while we have floated the possibility of doing a conference on networks in political science (stay tuned on that), one immediate step I would recommend is getting a solid group of political scientists to attend Sunbelt. I have now spoken to a number of folks, and I think we are pretty much assured of getting 10-15 political scientists there (instead of < 5), and I would encourage any interested political scientists to attend. Note that the deadline to submit abstracts is coming up fast—October 5.

And in the mean time, I would be interested in hearing suggestions as to how to catalyze things (either through e-mails to me, or preferably as a comment to this posting).

Posted by David Lazer at September 19, 2007 2:36 PM

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Comments

Posted by: reza at September 19, 2007 7:14 PM

Posted by: sue law at September 29, 2007 3:47 PM