Political Networks: Conference and Infrastructure Development

该奖项由2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》（Public Law 111-5）资助。该提案寻求资金，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中急剧扩展，但大多数都是在政治科学之外开发的。会议的目的是让那些一直在处理政治学中网络分析的独特问题的学者探索这种分析中出现的常见问题。与会者将包括政治科学家谁与网络分析的复杂性斗争，相信网络分析的发展将大大有助于政治科学的能力，分析个人和正式机构之间的关键关系，并相信目前的个人努力将大大受益于创造机会，共同努力解决这些问题。政治学应用为网络分析提供了重要的理论挑战，因为政治学中的具体兴趣变量和方法与社会学和其他领域的不同。与此同时，网络方法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中带来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速度，因此可用的方法（理论，实证，分析）将更快地应用于政治科学问题的范围，这些问题不容易分析当前对个人行为和正式制度的强调。该项目的广泛影响包括培训大约40名尚未接受过网络分析培训的研究生和教师。会议还将扩大向政治学受众传播网络分析的最新进展，以确保目前对政策和政治体系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.