Political Networks

Section Title: Political Networks Chairs: Petr Ocelík, Maria Brockhaus (SG on Political Networks, steering committee) The Political Networks Section aims to provide a multidisciplinary space of convergence for scholars that, while holding diverse research interests share an analytic approach to network processes in political life, coupled with strong attention to the integration of theory and empirical data. Political networks are conceived of in a broad sense - as defined around political actors, events that are relevant to the political biographies of individuals as well as around the use of digital communication technologies within political dynamics. Thus, ties can consist of exchanges of resources, information, and symbols, as well as of collaborations and communications that may occur both on- and offline. This section proposal is endorsed by the Standing Group on Political Networks. Based on the successful past ECPR GC sections, the following panels were included: Panel 1: Climate Policy Networks Climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ and a major challenge to governance and policymaking. A policy network analysis allows us to capture the complexities of formal institutional and informal linkages between diverse yet interdependent policy actors and enables us to explain how such arrangements shape climate change policymaking and policy implementation. The call is open to theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to climate policy networks. We particularly welcome studies on multi-level governance, coalition politics, socio-ecological systems, as well as multi-layer, comparative, and longitudinal policy networks analyses. Panel 2: Domestic and International Climate Policy: Two-Level Connectors Just recently, the international community has reinforced the 1.5 degrees target to protect the world from excessive global warming. But, at the same time, it is clear that the national commitments as formulated in the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are not enough. And, even if they were, these commitments must be translated into national policies. However, this is a complex task and involves multiple actors and levels of governance. Hence, there is not only a gap between the 1.5 degrees target and the NDCs but certainly also between the NDCs and the national policies. At the domestic level, the preferences and power resources of the relevant actors and the prevailing actor constellation are likely to influence how well countries are able to keep their promises. Specifically, this panel aims to focus on the position of “two-level” connectors in the national climate policy networks. These connectors are organisations or individuals strongly linked to both the formulation of the international commitments and the national level policies. Panels 3 and 4: Comparing Political Networks I and II 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, such research designs have remained rare. The panel thus invites papers with an explicit comparative research design related to any type of political network. Panel 5: From Texts to Networks: Semantic, Socio-Semantic, and Discourse Networks Collecting data on political networks via organizational surveys is a considerable challenge. At the same time, large volumes of texts containing information on political actors and their relations are publicly available. This panel showcases research activities, which obtain discourse, semantic, and socio-semantic networks from text data, and shows how network research might benefit from approaches that 1) use text as a database for political networks; 2) utilize various text analysis approaches to find ties between actors; or 3) combine text analysis with social networks. Panel 6: Network Analysis in International Relations and Security Studies This panel examines the added value of using network analysis to examine questions of international cooperation and security governance. All four papers apply a relational approach and discuss the advantages and challenges of such a methodological innovation in foreign policy analysis and international governance research. They do so, however, by analysing four distinct fields of international governance: energy governance, diplomacy, democracy promotion and risk governance. The aim of this panel is to cross-fertilize International Relations research with relational public policy scholarship and to critically examine the usability of relational approaches in IR and security studies. Panel 7: Organisational and Social Movement Networks The last decade has seen a number of contentious actions that developed across Europe and beyond, part of which unleashed with the 2008 crisis. This panel aims to explore alliances and repertoires of actions by challengers active in contentious politics and/or groups operating in service and good provision addressing the economic, environmental, social, and political consequences of the economic crisis. The following dimensions of networks are expected to be explored: a) the nature of alliances: specifically, the types of ties; the types of alliance structures, and clustering effects between groups and services; b) the type of actors involved in the networks; c) the degree of contentiousness; and d) the frames and collective identities at stake within networks. Short Bios Maria Brockhaus is a Professor of International Forest Policy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. A large part of her mostly comparative research is concerned with forests’ role in climate change mitigation and questions of the political economy of deforestation, policy change, and policy networks in the Global South. Petr Ocelík is an Assistant Professor at the Masaryk University. He uses SNA to study climate and energy policies in the Czech Republic.