Mediation in Multiple Networks: Elite Mobilization before the English Civil War

Abstract

Navigating political action typically requires coalition building across different interest groups. Because members represent divergent interests and are embedded in different networks, however, alliance formation is difficult. In this article, I consider how elites rely on political brokerage to overcome these divisions and form successful coalitions, with successful organization of the parliamentary opposition to the king before the English Civil War as a case in point. Supporting quantitative evidence comes from rich network data on the business, kinship, and political affiliations among 346 political and mercantile elites. Rather than the mere presence of mediator positions, I argue that effective brokerage of mobilizing alliances between interest groups requires political mediators who are equally affiliated with these diverse networks. Successful brokerage is conditional on both their structural position between groups and the diversity of ties that compose their personal networks. The results demonstrate that new merchant elites who were engaged in the American colonial trades acted as political mediators and facilitated the formation of a parliamentary opposition strong enough to defeat the royalist forces in London.

Brokers, clients and elite political networks in Mexico

“…These arguments rest on the assumption that coalitions are fixed and exogenous. 6 However, this assumption conflicts with literature stressing the role of brokerage in constructing coalitions (McAdam et al, 2001;Hillmann, 2008b). To the extent that brokers perform the mediation and signaling roles just discussed, the presence of brokers in elite coalitions should be expected to reduce factionalism.…”

Causes and consequences of the Protestant Reformation

“…Future research could do more to specify the concrete structural factors, agents of diffusion, and the relational structures underlying the rise, spread, and adoption of the Reformation. The use of network methods is expanding across the social sciences (Carrington, Scott and Wasserman 2005;Granovetter 2005;Ward, Stovel, and Sacks 2011) and these can be adapted to historical and comparative research in spite of the obstacles sometimes presented by historical data (Erikson and Bearman 2006;Gould 2003;Hillmann 2008;Weatherell 1998). The concurrence of more historical social scientists gaining familiarity with network concepts and methods alongside the digitization of historical materials will increasingly facilitate the collection of network data, opening up new and promising areas of research.…”

The Weber Thesis of Calvinism and Capitalism-Its Various Versions and Their “Fate” in Social Science

“…Specifically, these struggles, actually religious civil wars caused by Calvinist revolutions (Gorski, ), implicated original European Calvinism during Calvin's later years (the 1540–1560s) and after his death, at first in France and Geneva, and then the Netherlands—plus Scotland but apparently not seen as belonging to the “most highly developed countries”—during the second half of the sixteenth century. These religious revolutions and wars subsequently involved what Weber calls Calvinism's Anglo‐Saxon sectarian derivative, Puritanism, as in England mostly during the seventeenth century and also before, as exemplified in the Puritan Revolution against Anglicanism and the monarchy causing the English Civil War of the 1640s (Zaret, ; Hillmann, ; Kaufman, ). In particular, Weber views Calvinism's “most essential” dogma of predestination as a “very highly” influential and significant “causal factor” in historical terms, notably the theological ground (also, Troeltsch, [1912]) for Calvinist revolutions and wars—that is, the “rallying‐point to countless heroes of the Church militant”—especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.…”