6 - Agents and Events in Collective Action Fields

Summary

Chapter 6 extends beyond the preceding chapter and explores collective action fields. It begins by reviewing some limitations with the previous approach: its granularity is limited to organizational types and not particular associations, and it does not incorporate the role of events in the political process in tandem for individuals and organizations. Our example illustrates how to overcome such limitations where data allow it. Focusing on civil society actors in one British city, Bristol, we explore the networks linking citizens’ associations, their core members, and local public events of both a contentious and non-contentious kind. We treat those networks from two different perspectives: first as a “restricted” 3-mode network in which ties only occur between elements that are logically proximate to each other (in our case, individuals participating in organizations that themselves promote or support specific events); then as a “general” 3-mode network that additionally allows for ties across all different modes (in our case, this means including individuals’ direct participation in events). We show that again, where data allow, multimodal political network analysis offers a fruitful avenue to the analysis of political settings.