1 - Politics, Communities, and Power

Summary

Chapter 1 lays out the cornerstones of our argument. We highlight how power is multidimensional and is related to network position. We review several works on field theory, contest arenas, and social spaces to highlight how analysts can theorize political action in multimodal settings. Then we explain why communities are a key concept for theory and research in political networks: how they can be identified, how they are created, and what effects they have on individual-, community-, and systemic-level outcomes. Last, we show that while some researchers have studied multimodal social networks (particularly 2-mode networks), few have conducted systematic treatments of multimodal political networks.