Within policy processes, policy brokers and political entrepreneurs can have a crucial impact on decision-making. The policy process literature claims that actors’ resources and power are associated to their positions in political structure and reflect in their capacity to take strategic action. Brokers are identified here as those that gain by intermediating between others while political entrepreneurs are those evidently ‘punching above’ their political weight. For both type of actor relational assets such as trust and reciprocity are instrumental to their success.
In this paper while controlling for the political capital of exceptional agents we look at actor’s capability to build trust and adeptness at protecting their power over time. Translated into network terms, we are therefore not only interested in global network structures and individual actor centralities, but in their capacity to exploit structural holes and maintain their strategic positions in a network over time.
We test our hypotheses based on two empirical case studies and longitudinal data sets that capture such agents across distinct stages of the policy cycle. The first is Swiss Climate policy examined between 1998-2008 and the second a EU regulation decision in 2004 related to competition and transport policy.
