Political and policy networks

This chapter views political networks as multimodal entities consisting of at least three fundamental elements. Of them, individuals and organisations have agentic capacities; the third one, events, does not have agency, yet events represent a fundamental component of the political process in their own right. Broadly conceived, ‘events’ include policy decisions as well as protest rallies or revolutionary episodes, but also instances of symbolic production. The first two sections are devoted to individual political actors, starting with citizens’ networks and then moving to elite networks. The third section looks at different forms of political organising, differentiating in particular between coalitional dynamics between political organisations and the role of community networks in supporting political action. The fourth section is devoted to policy networks, followed by one addressing network approaches to political discourse. While it is important to recognise that all networks consist of structures of meaning, this section focuses in particular on some methodological approaches to the analysis of discourse. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of possible future developments.