Policy on the Web: The Climate Change Virtual Policy Network

This study explores how a scientist's location in science-based policy networks can affect her policy-oriented behaviors. In particular, we hypothesize that those scientists who fill structural holes in their networks will be more likely than others to engage in policy-oriented behaviors. The network data are defined by scientists' co-authorship on policy documents regarding climate change in the Great Lakes. We employ a two mode network analyses to identify clusters of scientists who co-authored similar documents, and relative to those clusters we identify those who fill structural holes by bridging between clusters. We find that those scientists who bridged between clusters were more likely to engage in policy-oriented behaviors of policy advocacy and advising than were others in the network. This is an example of a link between network location and policy-oriented behavior indicative of the broader phenomenon of how individuals exert agency given structural constraints.

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2006

Although many policy and political scientists have studied the Internet's role in electoral and organizational processes, there is little work that examines the Internet's effect on policy processes. Has the Internet tended to make policy deliberations more inclusive? Has it affected patterns of influence reputation among network participants? Has the Internet helped to bring new organizations into policy debates? This study provides preliminary answers to these questions. Treating policy networks as a type of interorganizational network, a ''socialized'' resource dependence framework is developed. Deployment of the Internet is conceptualized as an exogenous shock, where the shock alters the material resource base of a policy network and allows actors inside and outside the network to challenge structural power holders. Structural power holders attempt to ''mold'' use of the Internet to protect their position and its perquisites. To test this framework data were collected from two policy networks in ''Newstatia''-one focused on adult basic education policy and the other on mental health policy. Both policy networks appear to have become more exclusive since the deployment of the Internet. Electronic central discussion networks (or ''cores'') were primarily populated by actors who were already entrenched in positions of structural power within the network and possessed very high influence ratings. Most Internet communication occurs between members of the electronic core. At least preliminarily, the Internet appears to reinforce existing patterns of authority and influence.

This study explores how a scientist's location in science-based policy networks can affect her policyoriented behaviors. In particular, we hypothesize that those scientists who fill structural holes in their networks will be more likely than others to engage in policy-oriented behaviors. The network data are defined by scientists' coauthorship on policy documents regarding climate change in the Great Lakes. We employ a two-mode network analysis to identify clusters of scientists who coauthored similar documents, and relative to those clusters, we identify those who fill structural holes by bridging between clusters. We find that those scientists who bridged between clusters were more likely to engage in policy-oriented behaviors of policy advocacy and advising than were others in the network. This is an example of a link between network location and policy-oriented behavior indicative of the broader phenomenon of how individuals exert agency, given structural constraints.

International Review of Administrative Sciences

Measuring the influence of international public administrations has traditionally been conducted with ‘offline’ data, using interviews, surveys or official documents. However, an emerging strand of the literature argues that influence can also be observed ‘online’, with data based on online social networks, such as Twitter. Our contribution aims at bringing these two strands closer together. We triangulate offline data from a large-N survey with online data from Twitter to examine to what extent they provide distinct theoretical and methodological insights into the role of international public administrations in global governance. As a case study, we use the policy area of global climate governance, an issue area where the influence of international public administrations has raised increasing scholarly interest. Our findings show that international public administrations occupy potentially influential positions in both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ networks. They are more often central ac...

Science and Public Policy, 2013

Leading a coalition spanning 38 countries, the Danish Board of Technology organized "World Wide Views on Global Warming" (WWViews) on September 26, 2009. WWViews represented a pioneering effort to hold simultaneous citizen deliberations focusing on questions of climate change policy addressed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009 (COP15). Sponsors and organizers envisioned WWViews as a means to affect the COP15 negotiations, and the project included numerous strategies to influence policymaking. This paper examines the success of such strategies in the United States through the lens of "policy pathways," routes of influence to affect the behavior of policymakers and policymaking bodies. Our analysis suggests the difficulty of connecting citizen deliberations to meaningful policy pathways, and the importance of recognizing and enlisting policy networks, which we define as the collection of relationships, nodes, or preexisting organizational ties that can be mobilized in the service of agenda-or alternativesetting. Focusing on policy networks represents a promising strategy for planners and organizers of citizen forums, consensus conferences, or other deliberative gatherings to affect political debates that engage science and technology.

Public sector websites are heavily invested in influencing policy outcomes through information provisioning and dissemination. Traditionally e-government research has focused on the internal functions of e-government studying service delivery, horizontal information processing integration and levels of implementation maturity. This paper shifts the analytical focus to external facing e-government to consider the macro presentation of state-sponsored sites on the Web. To evaluate the external face of Canadian e-government this project measures the web-based impact of public sector websites in virtual policy networks. Virtual policy networks are web-based issues networks containing content on a specific policy topic and connected through hyperlinks. It is argued that government’s online nodality in these networks is an indicator of public sector websites’ authority and influence on the Web.

International Journal of Communication, 2017

We examine how the political context in which actors are embedded relates to their online communication. We argue that the degree of contentiousness of an issue (high vs. low conflict) is a decisive factor in explaining the distinct network structures generated by the actors’ hyperlink patterns. Comparing two such networks originating in the United States and Germany in the area of clilmate change, we found systematic differences between them that result in distinct political hyperlink topologies, which reflect the underlying issue context. These differences become visible in the reciprocity of the actors’ hyperlink communication, the fragmentation of the networks along the political divide, the recognition issue opponents receive from the media, and the transnational orientation of climate advocates and skeptics. This research implies that hyperlink communication is responsive to the political context, and that countermovements, in particular, manage to reap the benefits from onlin...

The Information Society, 2019

Research into hyperlink interaction patterns has been particularly interested in whether they integrate the online space or segregate it into "echo chambers." Concentrating on contentious politics in national settings, the existing studies have mainly examined the relationships between domestic actors, mostly bloggers. This study seeks to expand the focus by including several actor types, allowing their connective actions to reach beyond national borders, and employing a comparative approach that contrasts high-with low-contentious contexts. Analyzing climate change hyperlink networks originating in the US and Switzerland, the results show that their transnational dimension plays a crucial role in polarizing the discourse, regardless of the specific political context. We find similar patterns that segregate climate advocates from skeptics and lead to distinct transnational relationships within the camps. The results demonstrate that countermovement actors in particular are able to forge strong transnational alliances.

Public Understanding of Science, 2000

New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here “landscapes” a debate by displaying key “webby” relationships between organizations. “Debate-scaping” plots two organizational positionings—the organizations' inter-hyperlinking as well as their discursive affinities. The underlying claim is that hyperlinking and discursive maps provide a semblance of given socio-epistemic networks on the web. The climate change debate on the web in November 1998 serves as a test case. Three findings are reported. First, distinctive .com, .gov and .org linking styles were found. Second, organizations take care in making hyperlinks, leading to the premise that the hyperlinks (and the “missing links”) reveal which issue and debate framings organizations acknowledge, and find acceptable and unacceptable. Finally, it was learned that organizations take substantive positions ...

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2013

Policy networks are widely used by political scientists and economists to explain various financial and social phenomena, such as the development of partnerships between political entities or institutions from different levels of governance. The analysis of policy networks demands a series of arduous and time-consuming manual steps including interviews and questionnaires. In this paper, we estimate the strength of relations between actors in policy networks using features extracted from data harvested from the web. Features include webpage counts, outlinks, and lexical information extracted from web documents or web snippets. The proposed approach is automatic and does not require any external knowledge source, other than the specification of the word forms that correspond to the political actors. The features are evaluated both in isolation and jointly for both positive and negative (antagonistic) actor relations. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on two EU policy networks from the political science literature. Performance is measured in terms of correlation and mean square error between the human rated and the automatically extracted relations. Correlation of up to 0.74 is achieved for positive relations. The extracted networks are validated by political scientists and useful conclusions about the evolution of the networks over time are drawn.