Political Networks: Conference and Infrastructure Development

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。这项提议寻求资金，以便从2009年6月开始在哈佛大学举办一系列年度会议，将研究政治学网络的学者聚集在一起。尽管网络分析工具在过去十年里大幅扩张，但大多数都是在政治学之外开发的。会议的目的是让一直在处理政治学中网络分析的独特问题的学者们探索这种分析中出现的共性问题。与会者将包括与网络分析的复杂性作斗争的政治学家，他们认为，网络分析的发展将大大有助于政治学分析个人与正式机构之间的关键关系，并相信当前的个人努力将通过创造机会共同解决这些问题而大大受益。政治学的应用为网络分析提供了重要的理论挑战，因为政治学中的兴趣和方法的具体变量不同于社会学和其他领域的变量。与此同时，网络方法论的应用将有助于使政治学更积极地参与这些知识界的合作，并有助于在政治学和网络研究方面取得重要的理论和基础设施进步。会议将加快创新的发展和传播，因此现有的方法(理论、经验、分析)将更快地应用于一系列政治学问题，这些问题在目前强调个人行为和正式制度的情况下不容易分析。该项目的更广泛影响包括培训了大约40名尚未接受网络分析培训的研究生和教职员工。会议还将扩大向政治学受众传播网络分析的最新进展，以确保当前对政策和政治制度的分析具有这些技术，可用于研究受网络或关系影响的广泛主题。

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.