Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks

Abstract

What is a party? This article presents the argument that rmal party apparatus is only one part of an extended network of interest groups, media, other advocacy organizations and candidates. The authors have measured a portion of this network in the United States systematically by tracking lists of names transferred between political organizations. Two distinct and polarized networks are revealed, which correspond to a more liberal Democratic group and a more conservative Republican group. Formal party organizations, like the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, tend to receive information within their respective networks, which suggests that other groups serve to funnel information towards the formal party.

The Circus That Wasn't: The Republican Party's Quest for Order in California's 2003 Gubernatorial Recall Election

“…Except where otherwise indicated, I am referring to the "expanded" party-the network of activists, elite donors, key officeholders, and opinion makers who work with and on behalf of Republican causes and candidates. This is consistent with a line of research that sees parties less as formal hierarchies and more as informal networks (Bernstein 1999;Dominguez 2005;Koger, Masket, and Noel 2009;Masket 2009;Schwartz 1990). …”

“…SNA examines the underlying links between individuals as derived from their public behavior. Although it has only recently been employed in the field of political science, SNA has been used to determine coalitional behavior among extended party actors (Koger, Masket, and Noel 2009), factional alliances among political consultants (Doherty 2006), and preprimary convergence among donors in congressional nomination races (Dominguez 2005 Figure 3 shows the results for those 331 individuals who donated between $5,000 and $9,999 to candidates in the 2002 GOP primary race. 6 The graphical image was generated by NetDraw using its spring-embedding algorithm, which seeks to maximize distances between nodes for ease of visibility.…”

The Wielding Influence of Political Networks: Representation in Majority-Latino Districts

“…The group-centric theory suggests that coalitions and networks made up of policy demanders support candidates conditional on how faithful the candidates are to the policy agenda or preferences of the demanders (Cohen et al 2008;Koger, Masket, and Noel 2009;Masket 2009;Bawn et al 2012;Broockman 2014 (Sanbonmatsu 2006;Fox and Lawless 2010;Masket 2009). As a result, the organized and visible presence of these networks in a particular district is crucial for candidates' emergence.…”

Modeling History Dependence in Network-Behavior Coevolution

“…In one archetypal application of social-network analysis, for example, we may observe clusters of smokers and of nonsmokers because smoking is contagiousone acquires the habit from friends or avoids acquisition because one's friends abstain-or because smokers choose to hang with smokers and nonsmokers with nonsmokers: homophily by behaviortype-or we may observe clustering of smokers and nonsmokers because both the behavior of (non)smoking and the connections between mutually (non)smoking behavior-types are caused by actors' common exposure to outside conditions, such as shared sociodemographics that affect both the propensity to smoke and friendship formation. To give a more political example (expanded from Koger et al (2009Koger et al ( , 2010): representatives who sit together may vote similarly because they sit by party and so have similar constituencies (common exposure), or because they talk and influence each other (contagion), or they may choose to sit together because they know and like each other, which may be in some part because they vote similarly (selection). Or, to give the example from our empirical application, international conflict may be contagious through alliance connections, but nations that have similar conflict-behavior patterns are also more likely to ally (selection), and both alliance and conflict patterns may be affected the same exogenous conditions to which particular nation-state dyads are exposed, such as their contiguity.…”