Indictment of Paul Manafort Leads to a Cascade Network Behavior
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/30/manafort-lobbyists-wakeup-call-215763
Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, was faced with 12-count indictment, including but not limited to conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, and being an unregistered foreign agent. When Manafort (and his colleague Gates) was indicted, it was a “wake-up call” for K street. The law regarding the registry of foreign agents was often overlooked, especially because the enforcement of said law is lenient. The article points out that this indictment of Paul Manafort is equivalent to an “earthquake”. The article makes the argument that we can expect to see an increased focus on Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. At the time of the 2016 audit, the FARA office only had few full-time employees and was not equipped with the labor or the resources to pursue possible violations of FARA. They believe that this high-level indictment with lots of publicity will change the focus and increase funding for FARA enforcement. It will also change the dynamic of a closely-knit group of K Street firms. Many agents rushed to register as soon as the news of indictment spread.
This is very applicable to the network cascade model and the cluster theorem. Imagine K Street as a very dense cluster: in the world of lobbying, many lobbyists, agents, and firms know and have relationships with each other. After all, this is the nature of their work. Now, consider the “following the FARA” as the alternative strategy to the current strategy of bending the rules. Before Manafort’s indictment, nodes in the cluster followed the strategy of bending the rules since the alternative strategy was harder to spread through the dense cluster. However, as soon as one node in the K Street cluster (Manafort) was indicted, the alternative strategy spread through the cluster and this pressure made other nodes in the cluster register as foreign agents. This behavior can effectively be explained by the network cascade model and the cluster theorem.