Political Networks: Conference and Infrastructure Development

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This proposal seeks funding to stage a set of yearly conferences at Harvard University starting in June 2009 to bring together scholars studying networks in political science. Although network analysis tools have expanded dramatically in the past decade, most have been developed outside of political science. The purpose of the conference is to allow scholars who have been dealing with the unique problems of network analysis in political science to explore common problems that arise in this analysis. The participants will include political scientists who struggle with the complexities of network analysis, believe that the development of network analysis will contribute significantly to the ability of political science to analyze critical relationships that fall between individuals and formal institutions, and believe that current individual efforts will benefit substantially by creating opportunities to work together on these problems. Political science applications offer important theoretical challenges to network analysis because the specific variables of interest and approach in political science differ from those in sociology and other fields. At the same time, the application of network methodology will help to bring political science more actively into collaboration across these intellectual communities and help bring important theoretical and infrastructure advances in both political science and network studies. A conference will increase the pace of development and spread of innovations, so available approaches (theoretical, empirical, analytical) will be applied more rapidly to the range of political science issues that are not readily analyzed with the current emphasis on individual behavior and formal institutions. This project's broader impacts include the training of at approximately 40 graduate students and faculty not already trained in network analysis. The conference will also broaden the dissemination of the most recent advances in network analysis to a political science audience, to ensure that current analyses of policies and the political system have these techniques available for studying the broad range of topics affected by networks or relationships.