Michael T. Heaney

Causality in Political Networks

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

Brokering Health Policy: Coalitions, Parties, and Interest Group Influence

Assuming a position as broker between disconnected interests is one way for an interest group to influence the making of federal health policy. This study demonstrates how groups use their connections with political parties and lobbying coalitions to augment their brokerage positions and enhance their influence over policy making. Evidence is drawn from statistical analysis of 263 interviews with health policy elites and a qualitative case study of the debate over the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. The results explain, in part, how interest groups play their brokerage roles as dispersed actors in a decentralized system, rather than as central mediators that intervene in a wide range of policy disputes.

Multiplex networks and interest group influence reputation: An exponential random graph model

Interest groups struggle to build reputations as influential actors in the policy process and to discern the influence exercised by others. This study conceptualizes influence reputation as a relational variable that varies locally throughout a network. Drawing upon interviews with 168 interest group representatives in the United States health policy domain, this research examines the effects of multiplex networks of communication, coalitions, and issues on influence reputation. Using an exponential random graph model (ERGM), the analysis demonstrates that multiple roles of confidant, collaborator, and issue advocate affect how group representatives understand the influence of those with whom they are tied, after accounting for homophily among interest groups.

Hybrid activism: Social movement mobilization in a multimovement environment

Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. The authors argue that organizations with hybrid identities—those whose organizational identities span the boundaries of two or more social movements, issues, or identities—are vital to mobilizing these constituencies. They use original data from their study of the post-9/11 U.S. antiwar movement to show that individuals with past involvement in nonantiwar movements are more likely to join hybrid organizations than are individuals without involvement in nonantiwar movements. In addition, they show that organizations with hybrid identities occupy relatively more central positions in interorganizational cocontact networks within the antiwar movement and thus recruit significantly more participants in demonstrations than do nonhybrid organizations. Contrary to earlier research, they do not find that hybrid organizations are subject to an illegitimacy discount; instead, they find that hybridization can augment the ability of social movement organizations to mobilize their supporters in multimovement environments.

Organizing Women as Women: Hybridity and Grassroots Collective Action in the 21 st Century

The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women’s groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these organizations fostered collective consciousness among women, a large and diverse group, while confronting the echoes of backlash against previous mobilization efforts by women. We argue that the March and Code Pink achieved mobilization success by creating hybrid organizations that blended elements of three major collective action frames: maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine expression. These innovative organizations invented hybrid forms that cut across movements, constituencies, and political institutions. Using surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article explains how the March and Code Pink met the contemporary challenges facing women’s collective action in similar yet distinct ways. It highlights the role of feminine expression and concerns about the intersectional marginalization of women in resolving the historic tensions between maternalism and egalitarianism. It demonstrates hybridity as a useful analytical lens to understand gendered organizing and other forms of grassroots collective action.

Coalition dissolution, mobilization, and network dynamics in the U.S. antiwar movement

Coalition formation and dissolution are integral parts of social movement politics. This article addresses two questions about the effect of coalition politics on organizational processes within social movements. First, how does coalition leadership influence who attends mass demonstrations? Second, how does the dissolution of a coalition affect the locations of organizations in activist networks? The case of schism between United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) in the contemporary American antiwar movement (2001–2007) is examined. Survey results demonstrate that variations in coalition leadership do not significantly affect protest demographics, though they do attract supporters with different political attitudes, levels of commitment, and organizational affiliations. Further, network analysis establishes that coalition dissolution weakens the ties between previous coalition partners and creates opportunities for actors uninvolved in the split to reaffirm and improve brokerage opportunities. The end result is that preexisting network structures serve to mitigate the effects of coalition dissolution on social movements.

Social Networks and American Politics Introduction to the Special Issue

This article overviews the special issue on “Social Networks and American Politics.” The authors explain that social network analysis is a multimethod set of approaches to examining the pattern of connections that are created among individuals and institutions when they engage in their daily activities. It is especially valuable when research problems are about (a) the flow of information; (b) coordination, cooperation, or trust; (c) informal organization; or (d) multiple levels of organization. In addressing these problems, network analysis has expanded during the last decade within the study of American politics, contributing to knowledge about political institutions, behavior, and network theory. Promising directions for future research include the study of power, preference aggregation, information flow and transaction costs, and network dynamics.

Polarized Networks The Organizational Affiliations of National Party Convention Delegates

Previous research has documented that the institutional behaviors (e.g., lobbying, campaign contributions) of political organizations reflect the polarization of these organizations along party lines. However, little is known about how these groups are connected at the level of individual party activists. Using data from a survey of 738 delegates at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions, we use network regression analysis to demonstrate that co-membership networks of national party convention delegates are highly polarized by party, even after controlling for homophily due to ideology, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, educational attainment, income, and religious participation. Among delegates belonging to the same organization, only 1.78% of these co-memberships between delegates crossed party lines, and only 2.74% of the ties between organizations sharing common delegates were bipartisan in nature. We argue that segregation of organizational ties on the basis of party adds to the difficulty of finding common political ground between the parties.

Building the Chicago School

The Chicago School of Political Science, which emerged at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, is widely known for its reconception of the study of politics as a scientific endeavor on the model of the natural sciences. Less attention has been devoted to the genesis of the school itself. In this article, we examine the scientific vision, faculty, curriculum, and supporting institutions of the Chicago School. The creation of the Chicago School, we find, required the construction of a faculty committed to its vision of the science of politics, the muster of resources to support efforts in research and education, and the formation of curriculum to educate students in its precepts and methods. Its success as an intellectual endeavor, we argue, depended not only on the articulation of the intellectual goals but also, crucially, on the confluence of disciplinary receptiveness, institutional opportunity, and entrepreneurial talent in support of a science of politics.

Gender Attitudes, Gendered Partisanship: Feminism and Support for Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton among Party Activists

ABSTRACT Activists in the Democratic and Republican parties have distinct concerns about women’s place in American politics and society. These views lead them to evaluate female candidates through different ideological lenses that are conditioned, in part, on their divergent attitudes about gender. We explore the implications of these diverging lenses through an examination of the 2008 candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, using data from an original survey of Democratic and Republican National Convention delegates. We find that delegate sex did not affect their evaluations but that evaluations were influenced by the interaction of partisanship and attitudes about women’s roles.