LIST OF PANELS

The current governance systems often need to respond to complex challenges ranging from the use of natural resources through migration management to pandemics mitigation involving diverse actors interacting often across multiple scales. A political networks perspective allows capturing such complexities by focusing on how actors such as organizations or individuals interact beyond formal and traditionally hierarchical political procedures (Knoke et al., 1996), or how they relate to a diversity of institutions or forums (Lubell 2013), or to the multitude of policy-relevant issues (Brandenberger et al. 2020).  In contrast to broad macro-level explanations, a network perspective also enables to analyze specific configurations of actors and their relationships that may markedly vary depending on particular contexts (Ylä-Anttila et al., 2018). This can include many different types of political actors (different types of individuals such as members of parliament or public servants, and organizational actors such as public administrations, non-governmental organizations, private firms, political parties), and network ties can consist of exchanges of resources, information, as well as of conflict, collaboration and communication that may occur both on- and offline.

A network approach to politics is thus important as it allows political scientists to disentangle how political actors mobilize and exchange resources, how they coordinate actions, and how network structure shapes decision-making and outputs. Comparing political networks over time and space is a powerful strategy to generalize the findings and support causal explanations on the antecedents or consequences of network structures. Comparisons over space can include cross-country comparisons (Broadbent, 2016; Brockhaus et al., 2014) or within-country comparisons (Fischer and Sciarini, 2016) 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 (Leifeld, 2017). Despite the potential benefit of such comparisons to our understanding of political networks, such research designs have remained rare. The key research questions to be addressed are:

·        How network structures influence political decision-making and policy outcomes?

·        How network positions of specific political actors influence the political decision-making and policy outcomes?

·        What are the patterns of coevolution of the actor and network level in political processes?

References

Brandenberger, L., Ingold, K., Fischer, M., Schläpfer, I., & Leifeld, P. (2020). Boundary Spanning Through Engagement of Policy Actors in Multiple Issues. Policy studies journal.

Broadbent, J., 2016. Comparative Climate Change Policy Networks, in: Victor, J.N., Montgomery, A.H., Lubell, M. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190228217.013.38

Brockhaus, M., Di Gregorio, M., Carmenta, R., 2014. REDD+ policy networks: Exploring actors and power structures in an emerging policy domain. Ecol. Soc. 19. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07098-190429

Fischer, M., Sciarini, P., 2016. Drivers of Collaboration in Political Decision Making: A Cross-Sector Perspective. J. Polit. 78, 63–74. https://doi.org/10.1086/683061

Knoke, D., Pappi, F.U., Broadbent, J., Tsujinaka, Y., 1996. Comparing Policy Networks, Comparing Policy Networks. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139174497

Leifeld, P., 2017. Discourse Network Analysis: Policy Debates as Dynamic Networks, in: Victor, J.N., Montgomery, A.H., Lubell, M.N. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. pp. 301–325. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190228217.013.25

Lubell, M. (2013). Governing institutional complexity: The ecology of games framework. Policy studies journal, 41(3), 537-559.

Ylä-Anttila, T., Gronow, A., Stoddart, M.C.J., Broadbent, J., Schneider, V., Tindall, D.B., 2018. Climate change policy networks: Why and how to compare them across countries. Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 45, 258–265. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ERSS.2018.06.020

Call for papers

The current governance systems often need to respond to complex challenges ranging from the use of natural resources through migration management to pandemics mitigation involving diverse actors interacting often across multiple scales. A political networks perspective allows capturing complexities by focusing on how actors such as organizations or individuals interact beyond formal and traditionally hierarchical political processes or how they relate to a diversity of institutions or forums, or to the multitude of policy-relevant issues. Comparing political networks across different temporal, institutional, sectoral or spatial contexts is an important strategy to work out the specificities of political networks, the factors that influence their structure and the position of individual actors, as well as policy outputs and outcomes related to political networks. The latter might be the most important aspect, as the relation between political networks and outputs has often been claimed but rarely been shown empirically.

Most importantly, the panel invites papers with an explicit comparative research design related to any type of political networks. Network that are relevant to this panel can include different types of nodes (different types of individuals such as members of parliament or public servants, and organizational actors such as public administrations, non-governmental organizations, private firms, political parties), and network ties can consist of exchanges of resources, information, as well as of conflict, collaboration and communication that may occur both on- and offline.

Papers can cover any kind of substantive topic of political relevance, such as climate change, energy politics, migration, economic policy, health issues, social policy, European integration, development, or any more. The panel is sponsored by the European Consortium on Political Research Standing Group on Political Networks.