political networks in american behavioral scientist
My collaborator, Michael Heaney, has a nice article in the new American Behavioral Scientist where he measures polarization in party networks:
Previous research has documented that the institutional behaviors (e.g., lobbying, campaign contributions) of political organizations reflect the polarization of these organizations along party lines. However, little is known about how these groups are connected at the level of individual party activists. Using data from a survey of 738 delegates at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions, we use network regression analysis to demonstrate that co-membership networks of national party convention delegates are highly polarized by party, even after controlling for homophily due to ideology, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, educational attainment, income, and religious participation. Among delegates belonging to the same organization, only 1.78% of these co-memberships between delegates crossed party lines, and only 2.74% of the ties between organizations sharing common delegates were bipartisan in nature. We argue that segregation of organizational ties on the basis of party adds to the difficulty of finding common political ground between the parties.
Good for those interested in the growing literature on networks in political science.
Every library needs these books: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz
Median voter theorem suggests that the orgs w high betweenness should be most effective at getting policy through. This is consistent with Dems giving up on assault weapons (NRA) and GOP pushing Medicare Part D under GWB (AARP).
gabrielrossman
November 12, 2012 at 4:17 pm
More of this!!
The current issue of the policy studies journal has a collection of articles on policy networks
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psj.2012.40.issue-3/issuetoc
Bubbles79
November 14, 2012 at 1:15 pm