Social Networks in Political Conflicts
Source: Janoski, Thomas E. and Jonas, Adam, “A Synthetic Theory of Political Sociology: Bringing Social Networks and Power Dependence to Power Resources Theory in City Politics” (2021). Sociology White Papers. 5.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/sociology_reports/5
We all could agree that within a network, there always exists some form of the power dynamic. Political sociologists have been trying to break down the traffic of power in networks in order to understand how different groups play a role in a political decision. In “A Synthetic Theory of Political Sociology: Bringing Social Networks and Power Dependence to Power Resources Theory in City Politics”, the authors first look at multiple sociological theories of power in networks and then propose a model of quantifying power and analyzing the power collision as a synthesis of the theories.
The Elite Theory raised by Floyd Hunter mapped the US’s social network as a triangular network consisting of business, political and religious elites. This grabs the very central structure of political social networks, but it is too vague as it fails to explain the mechanism of power. The Power Resources Theory emerged from a quasi-Marxist viewpoint and examines the network by asking who has more a priori resources and hence more power than others. However different types of resources should be measured in different ways as some are direct resources and some aid indirectly. The Power Dependency Theory points out that A would have more power over B if A has more alternatives than B. This theory gives important insight into group bargaining with labor and management or political conflict in a community, but on a broader level, it is very hard to collect enough information soon every potential alternative to reach a conclusion. And the last theory was raised by Scott Feld who argued that only measuring the centrality does not describe the power structure in social networks accurately as powerful people/groups might only interact with a few and their underlying groups do most of the connections.
After evaluating those theories, the authors combine all of them to develop a scoring system to explain how one side’s power overweighs the other in a political conflict. First, we identify all the actors in the network and the side they pick to be on. Then, we recognize the resources each actor holds and the potential alternatives generated by those resources. With these factors in mind, we are able to construct a scoring for the power each actor holds by measuring the centrality of each actor (how many nodes they are connected to) and multiplying it proportionally with how many resources and alternatives they have. From the scoring, it is very obvious to see why a certain coalition won the conflict as they could mobilize the most resources to have different alternatives.
This article is closely connected to what we learned in class as this kind of political conflict boils down to a complicated version of bargaining. The elite power theory points out the only actors of any political conflicts, and because they form a 3-node triangular graph, there is never a stable outcome, and hence the powers are constantly competing and cooperating. The resources and alternatives together explain what the outside option is actually composed of: the more people the actor knows, the more ways he/she could connect to the decision-making person/group, and the higher chance he/she could appeal to them. On the other hand, unlike the bargaining graph, we were learning in class, this article focuses on the balance of two opposite sides, every actor adds to one instead of acting as a bargaining power individually. It is very interesting to explore how the graph of such bargaining would turn out to be as two sides form two clusters and every now and then there will be some mobilization of actors.