Comparing Political Networks

Abstract

Comparing political networks over time and space is a powerful strategy to support causal explanations on the antecedents or consequences of network structures. Comparisons over space can include cross-country comparisons or within-country comparisons across regions or policy sectors. Comparisons over time can include network observations at several discrete time points, or can be based on the dynamic assessment of network evolution. Despite the potential benefit of such comparisons to our understanding of political networks, the functioning of political systems, public policy-making, and so on, empirical applications of such research designs have remained rare. The panel thus invites papers with an explicit comparative research design related to any type of political networks.