Using SNA to shed light on the organizational structure of political movements

With under two months left until Election Day, “Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks” – an article by Gregory Koger, Seth Masket, and Hans Noel – is highly relevant to current discourse regarding the direction of democracy in the US.

Much has been made of the landmark 2010 Citizens United decision, which eliminated campaign finance limits for individuals, corporations and interest groups, heralding the rise of “Super PACs.” To date, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that Super PACs have contributed over $250 million to the current campaign cycle. Similarly, many have become concerned that significant corporate influence in the media sector has contributed to an increase in partisan reporting, minimizing average citizens’ access to objective analysis of events. Despite discussion of these developments in the abstract, political parties, media organizations, and interest groups continue to publicly insist on organizational independence.  Yet it is clear they at least influence one another, if more formalized cooperation does not exist behind closed doors.

Koger et al.’s research uses social network analysis to elucidate the extent of formalized, behind the scenes cooperation between media organizations, interest groups, and formal political parties during the 2004-2005 election cycle. They accomplished this by relying on the metric of shared mailing lists to signify organizational cooperation between two publicly unassociated entities. Acting as a political donor, the authors mapped the social network of the Republican and Democratic Parties by measuring the paper trail of responses that their initial set of contributions generated. Their findings confirmed that US politics are shaped by “extended party networks” that consist of the aforementioned actors cooperating in both formal and informal contexts.  They also found that, at least during the period studied, the Democratic network was much larger and integrated than that of the Republicans.

While there are clear methodological challenges to this type of analysis, it nonetheless holds significant potential beyond the US context. What if we could employ similar techniques to better understand the popular bases and or donor networks of political parties in emerging democracies? Even though the article is several years old, I think it’s well worth posting.