studying policy advocacy through social network analysis

Abstract

Social Network Analysis (SNA) conceptualizes a policy-making process as a network of actors. It can assess if an interest group (IGs) occupies a leading central position within this policy network, if it belongs to various ad hoc coalitions or if it plays a brokering role between different stakeholders. Such network variables are crucial to capture how IGs mobilize and gain access to policymakers, and to explain their goal achievements and potential policy influence as well. This article reviews recent studies applying the methodological tools of SNA. It then proposes an innovative research design to investigate how IGs seek to influence the course of a policy-making process across many institutional venues.

studying interest groups: methodological challenges and tools

“…These authors identify also several issues that were important within these cases as do Bunea and Ibenskas (2016) in their analysis of EU car emissions policy. While these contributions identify the issues they compare only after case selection, Varone et al's (2016) contribution on the usage of network analysis builds on new developments in issue-or policy-based sampling to select the cases they study (see Baumgartner et al, 2009;Mahoney, 2008;Beyers et al, 2014b). Given the amount of work it takes to identify the relevant interest group population in legislative studies, the relations among the involved actors as well as the positions they held on the discussed issues (see below), the authors propose to select a limited number of most different policy issues for a detailed comparative study of the policy processes on these issues using social network analysis.…”

“…Notably, the articles discuss research methods to establish the population of policy advocates in public policy-making processes (Varone et al, 2016) and of interest groups that are politically active in major national arenas (Binderkrantz and Pedersen, 2016). Thus, in their research design proposal for social network analyses that draws on a study of publicy policymaking in California, Varone et al (2016) suggest to take into account all relevant institutional venues and make a systematic inventory of all interest groups that sought to influence the binding policy decisions that were made on a studied policy issue in these venues: the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, and the institutions of direct democracy. In their words, 'taking into account a whole policy-making process and focusing on all activated venues is crucial to explain the advocacy activities and the policy success of [interest groups, RE] in general …' (Varone et al, 2016).…”

“…Thus, in their research design proposal for social network analyses that draws on a study of publicy policymaking in California, Varone et al (2016) suggest to take into account all relevant institutional venues and make a systematic inventory of all interest groups that sought to influence the binding policy decisions that were made on a studied policy issue in these venues: the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, and the institutions of direct democracy. In their words, 'taking into account a whole policy-making process and focusing on all activated venues is crucial to explain the advocacy activities and the policy success of [interest groups, RE] in general …' (Varone et al, 2016). After having discussed the trouble of identifying the relevant actors, the next section investigates the research problems involved in analyzing the strategies and activities of interest groups.…”

“…All articles discuss the adequacy of methods commonly employed to deal with these research problems and suggest amendments, procedures, and practices to make them more suitable for the task at hand. While Varone et al (2016) develop a pure research design for the usage of social network analysis in public policy analysis, the other contributions provide also empirical illustrations for their methodological arguments. The aim of the symposium is to increase awareness of the intricacies of such research problems and to work toward the development of suitable practices to handle them.…”

Inter-variable correlation prediction with fuzzy connected-triples

“…For instance, in bioinformatics, SNA is adjusted to present gene expression networks (Almansoori et al 2012), describing protein-protein interactions (Franceschini et al 2012). In politics research, SNA is adopted to conceptualise a policymaking process as a network of political actors (Varone et al 2017). In public health care, SNA is employed to assess factors contributing to the service, the care process and the patient outcome (Bae et al 2015).…”