Article

Dissecting discursive contention: A relational analysis of the Dutch debate on minority integration, 1990–2006

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

This paper elaborates a relational approach to examine discursive contention. We develop a network method to identify groups forming through contentious interactions as well as relational measures of polarization, leadership, solidarity and various aspects of discursive power. The paper analyzes how an assimilationist movement confronted its adversaries in the Dutch debate on minority integration. Over different periods in the debate, we find a recurrent pattern: a small yet cohesive group of challengers with strong discursive leaders forces their framing of integration issues upon other participants. We suggest that the pattern found in our study may exemplify a more universal network pattern behind discursive contention.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Supplementary resource (1)

... Recognizing that the opinion environment within a community tends to be homophilous, this study examines how interactions among communities online, especially communities with opposing views, affect each other's discussion topics. We draw from research on networked public spheres (Benkler et al., 2015), cyberbalkanization (Brainard, 2009), and the evolution of topics (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013;Griffith & Mullins, 1972;Uitermark et al., 2016) to hypothesize that although the interactions among communities do little to change people's view, they may influence the agenda for what other communities talk about. To test our hypotheses, our computational research design combines social network analysis, topic modeling, community detection, and temporal topic evolution models. ...
... While the current study focuses on social mediated communication, scholars in other fields have explored similar questions such as how interactions among scientific communities influence each other's research topics and contribute to scientific evolutions (Griffith & Mullins, 1972;Uitermark, et al., 2016). We draw from these areas to explore whether ideologically distinct communities can set the agenda for what other communities talk about. ...
... Generally, group level interactions influenced other groups' research agenda. Uitermark et al. (2016) applied Griffith and Mullins's (1972) insights in their study of contentious public discourses in the Netherlands about the integration of ethnic minorities and proposed several expectations about the community-level interactions between opposing movements. First, they suggested that the public interested in a particular issue would cluster into communities, with some communities confronting others. ...
Article
Full-text available
Investigations of networked public spheres often examine the structures of online platforms by studying users’ interactions. These works suggest that users’ interactions can lead to cyberbalkanization when interlocutors form homophilous communities that typically have few connections to others with opposing ideologies. Yet, rather than assuming communities are isolated, this study examines community-level interactions to reveal how communities in online discourses are more interdependent than previously theorized. Specifically, we examine how such interactions influence the evolution of topics overtime in source and target communities. Our analysis found that (a) the size of a source community (the community that initiates interactions) and a target community (the community that receives interactions), (b) the stability of the source community, and (c) the volume of mentions from a source community to a target community predicts the level of influence one community has on another’s discussion topics. We argue this has significant theoretical and practical implications. Lay Summary Political discussions online, especially those in the United States, seem to range between harmonious discussions of likeminded people and heated debates that end with few, if any, who have changed their minds. Researchers have often examined these balkanized/polarized situations by studying online communities as isolated echo chambers of opinion. Our study focuses on the interactions between online communities who have different worldviews. We examine communities engaged in the global refugee crisis. We consider how the inter-community interactions influence the agenda of the respective communities. Our longitudinal analysis on the one hand confirms previous studies, namely that intra-community interactions indeed resemble echo chambers. On the other hand, we also find that there is interdependence in the inter-community discussion topics, albeit some communities had greater influence on other communities’ discussion topics. For example, larger, more stable communities command more influence.
... While the literature thus suggests that assimilationist parties and opinion makers have gained ground, it remains challenging to develop concepts and methods that capture with precision how power relations in debates have changed. To respond to this challenge, this article applies and elaborates on a relational approach first developed by Uitermark et al. (2016). They studied debates in opinion articles in high-brow newspapers in the Netherlands from 1990 until 2005 and found that, in this particular setting, assimilationists were grouped together in a cluster that was small in number but had higher cohesion, stronger leadership and greater resonance compared to their anti-assimilationist opponents. ...
... Building on both claims analysis and computational network analysis, our aim is to examine discursive power relations in public debates. To facilitate historical and comparative analysis, we use the same concepts and operationalizations as Uitermark et al. (2016). Here, we further elaborate the theoretical underpinnings of our approach and articulate our research questions. ...
... RQ2: How does this compare to the earlier period, as studied by Uitermark et al. (2016) in the Netherlands (1990Netherlands ( -2006? ...
Article
Full-text available
Minority integration is a highly contested topic in public debates, and assimilationist actors appear to have gained discursive ground. However, it remains difficult to accurately depict how power relations in debates change and evolve. In this study, the public debates on minority integration in Flanders and the Netherlands between 2006 and 2012 are studied to ascertain changing power relations. We use a relational method to identify clusters formed through discursive contention and study polarization in the debates as well as several aspects of discursive power between and within clusters. In the Netherlands, a pattern identified in earlier research is reproduced, whereby a unified but small cluster of assimilationists with strong discursive leaders is able to dominate the debate on integration. In Flanders, group consolidation is too low, so the clusters cannot be viewed as cohesive groups. Another difference to the Dutch debate is that the volume of opinion articles is much lower and the actors in the Flemish debate are more often foreign opinion leaders. We conclude that the assimilationists have increased their discursive power in the Dutch debate, while the anti-assimilationists have lost power. The stark contrast between the Dutch and Flemish discursive landscape highlights the need for more research on the causal mechanism behind discursive struggles.
... After the 1990s, the integration discourse changed profoundly. Uitermark has described it as a discursive revolution (Uitermark, 2016) in which pragmatism has been replaced with culturalism. This discourse became dominant because of the (political) actors who sparked integration debates, formed alliances by rallying around discursive leaders while facing a fragmented opposition without leadership and in response to 'culturalist' discursive behavior. ...
... In the following, the chapters are detailed per level, with attention for objectives, methods, data collection and research questions. (Uitermark, 2012;Uitermark et al., 2016). With this relational discourse analysis, we determine how the integration debate is structured in terms of discursive clusters, as well as how the discursive power is divided between the clusters and cluster leaders. ...
... As a proxy for the public debate, we analyze the way actors refer to each other (i.e., negative, neutral, or positive) in all the opinion articles on minority integration in the op-ed sections of three quality newspapers in both Flanders (n = 128) and the Netherlands (n = 343). This elitist venue, while obviously not being representative for the public debate as a whole, has substantial influence on other news media via intermedia agenda-setting (Brosius & Eps, 1995;Golan, 2006;Walgrave, Soroka & Nuytemans, 2008), and is a pivotal setting in which elites who construct integration policy 'duke it out' in order to gain discursive dominance (Uitermark, 2016). ...
... These, in turn, disempower citizens hoping to use online efficiencies to organize collective action. Meanwhile, in accordance with the power laws inherent to Web traffic, hierarchy arises even within Path 5 networks; citizen debates cluster around a few leaders who set agendas but don't necessarily convert many people (Uitermark, Traag, & Bruggeman, 2016). The few public-originated frames that enter the larger cascade must gain elite sponsorship (and often reframing) for wider distribution. ...
Article
Full-text available
With the maturation of social media as a form of communication and the decline in mainstream institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which information is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. We consider five important, new, digitally enabled "pump-valves" in the flow of socio-political information and frames: platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors. We revise the cascading network activation model of frame activation and spread, developed before digital media's rise. This new integrated model illuminates how these five features of digitalization affect relationships among elites, traditional media, and individuals, and suggests research on whether they flatten and democratize hierarchies of information control and power or entrench dominant structures. With the maturation of social media as a form of political communication and information consumption and the decline in the fortunes and authority of institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which news is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. Included among these imperatives is a reassessment of framing. In a special issue assessing communication's status as a discipline, Entman (1993) wrote of framing as a fractured paradigm, and argued conceptually-enhanced framing research could offer critical insights into the influences of communication on consciousness, behavior, and power. The concept of framing organizes scholarly understanding of exactly how communication promotes particular interpretations of reality via the interaction of individuals' existing schemas-themselves largely products of prior framing-and newly communicated information. Frames activate and spread among elites, journalists, and citizens,
... Such networks have been employed to test social balance theory [63,64] and status theory [65][66][67][68][69][70], to measure the impact of negative ties in organizational context [71] and to predict tie formation [72] (for an overview of research on signed social networks see [62]). A few studies have employed signed networks to study polarized debates [73][74][75]. However, the potential of signed network analysis to study polarization on social media has remained underutilized, with a small number of studies that are relatively small in scope. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
The influential “echo chamber” hypothesis suggests that social media drive polarization through a mutual reinforcement between isolation and radicalization. The existence of such echo chambers has been a central focus of academic debate, with competing studies finding ostensibly contradictory empirical evidence. This paper identifies a fundamental methodological limitation of these empirical studies: they do not differentiate between negative and positive interactions. To overcome this limitation, we develop a method to extract signed network representations of Twitter debates using Machine Learning. Applying our approach to a major Dutch cultural controversy, we show that the inclusion of negative interactions provides a new empirical picture of the dynamics of online polarization. Our findings suggest that conflict, not isolation, is at the heart of polarization.
... In its current form, the platform's components allow users to visualize causation-related comments through their reply structure (see Figure 4). This combination of the semantic analysis of reader comments with the social network structure that underlies them aligns with the method of relational discourse analysis (see, for instance, Uitermark et al., 2016). By enabling the combination of semantic and social information, the opinion observatory facilitates the study of the discursive dimension of opinions. ...
Article
Full-text available
Social media house a trove of relevant information for the study of online opinion dynamics. However, harvesting and analyzing the sheer overload of data that is produced by these media poses immense challenges to journalists, researchers, activists, policy makers, and concerned citizens. To mitigate this situation, this article discusses the creation of (social) media observatories: platforms that enable users to capture the complexities of social behavior, in particular the alignment and misalignment of opinions, through computational analyses of digital media data. The article positions the concept of “observatories” for social media monitoring among ongoing methodological developments in the computational social sciences and humanities and proceeds to discuss the technological innovations and design choices behind social media observatories currently under development for the study of opinions related to cultural and societal issues in European spaces. Notable attention is devoted to the construction of Penelope: an open, web-services-based infrastructure that allows different user groups to consult and contribute digital tools and observatories that suit their analytical needs. The potential and the limitations of this approach are discussed on the basis of a climate change opinion observatory that implements text analysis tools to study opinion dynamics concerning themes such as global warming. Throughout, the article explicitly acknowledges and addresses potential risks of the machine-guided and human-incentivized study of opinion dynamics. Concluding remarks are devoted to a synthesis of the ethical and epistemological implications of the exercise of positioning observatories in contemporary information spaces and to an examination of future pathways for the development of social media observatories.
... In other words, it can be explained by looking at the discursive network that the actors were embedded in and the way the movement challenged the established order (Uitermark, 2012). Uitermark et al. (2016) constructed a relational discourse approach to analyze public debate and its constituent actors and discourses, to analyze the public debate on minority immigration and integration in the Netherlands between 1990 and 2005. In relational discourse analysis, the way actors refer to one another (i.e. in a neutral, positive or negative way) in the public debate helps determine discursive clusters as well as the power relationships within and between these clusters. ...
Chapter
In this chapter, we propose a research agenda that approaches representations of migration from a multi-stakeholder perspective. Media representations of migration continue to draw the attention of scholars, as they are to a large extent linked to public perceptions and policies towards migration. As an important policy level of both migration and media, we will start from a national-policy viewpoint and develop a framework that recognizes and includes relevant stakeholder groups so as to achieve a more intricate and multi-perspectival understanding of representational strategies.
... 17 Sep 2018 as abortion in US public opinion (DiMaggio et al., 1996). Besides different forms of social polarization such as, for instance, increasingly antagonistic references between two groups of different identity (Uitermark et al., 2016;Mason, 2018), also further more specific notions of issue polarization have been put forth (DiMaggio et al., 1996). The sorting of opinions regarding diverse sets of political goals along ideological dimensions as recently identified in opinion data on American public opinion (Dimock et al., 2014) is of particular relevance in our context. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of evaluative associations links different (partially overlapping) sets of facts to different political issues and determines an agents' attitudinal positions in a way borrowed from expectancy value theory. If agents preferentially interact with other agents that hold similar attitudes on one or several issues, this leads to biased argument pools and polarization in the sense that groups of agents selectively belief in distinct subsets of facts. Besides the emergence of a bi-modal distribution of opinions on single issues that most previous opinion polarization models address, our model also accounts for the alignment of attitudes across several issues along ideological dimensions.
... These, in turn, disempower citizens hoping to use online efficiencies to organize collective action. Meanwhile, in accordance with the power laws inherent to Web traffic, hierarchy arises even within Path 5 networks; citizen debates cluster around a few leaders who set agendas but don't necessarily convert many people (Uitermark, Traag, & Bruggeman, 2016). The few public-originated frames that enter the larger cascade must gain elite sponsorship (and often reframing) for wider distribution. ...
Article
Full-text available
With the maturation of social media as a form of communication and the decline in mainstream institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which information is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. We consider five important, new, digitally enabled “pump-valves” in the flow of socio-political information and frames: platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors. We revise the cascading network activation model of frame activation and spread, developed before digital media’s rise. This new integrated model illuminates how these five features of digitalization affect relationships among elites, traditional media, and individuals, and suggests research on whether they flatten and democratize hierarchies of information control and power or entrench dominant structures.
... The communicative figurations approach is a member of the family of 'relational theories', which generally is said to include Elias, Bourdieu, present-day practice theory, network theory and new institutional theory (cf. Emirbayer 1997;Uitermark et al. 2016). What connects these theories is a focus on relations rather than individuals, and on meaning, value and power as emerging from relations between people. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter discusses the theoretical contributions made in this volume, asking three questions. First, does the figurational approach introduced here allow us to see things that we previously did not? Secondly, how does the new figurational approach relate to the figurational approach as developed by Elias and his followers? Thirdly, is this the beginning of a new paradigm that bridges media and social theory? The chapter concludes that the ‘communicative figurations’ approach shows great promise as this paradigm successfully integrates media studies and social theory. It coins a number of useful concepts, and provides a coherent methodological framework. Compared with current figurational approaches in sociology, its theorization of power is rather weak; but the notions of mediation, frames of relevance and nested figurations are important innovations.
... We are particularly interested in the density of ties and in whether certain nodes stand out as hubs. If we find that subgraphs are tightly knit and organized around hubs, then we have a rationale for characterizing groups in terms of their most central users, which we can regard as group focal points [50]. To determine tie density of subgroups, we calculate the local average clustering coefficient and compare it to the clustering coefficient of a random Erdős-Rényi graph with an equal number of nodes and edges [51]. ...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce Instagram as a data source for use by scholars in urban studies and neighboring disciplines and propose ways to operationalize key concepts in the study of cities. These data can help shed light on segregation, the formation of subcultures, strategies of distinction, and status hierarchies in the city. Drawing on two datasets of geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam and Copenhagen collected over a twelve-week period, we present a proof of concept for how to explore and visualize sociospatial patterns and divisions in these two cities. We take advantage of both the social and the geographic aspects of the data, using network analysis to identify distinct groups of users and metrics of unevenness and diversity to identify socio-spatial divisions. We also discuss some of the limitations of these data and methods and suggest ways in which they can complement established quantitative and qualitative approaches in urban scholarship.
Article
In some decade years, Digital information technology has enabled the public to access information online and participate in public debates to a wider extent. This has led to the restructuring and transformation of public consultation. The public is interconnected and interactive within a wider range and hierarchy. forming a digital public sphere. On the other hand, When examining its discourse construction and interactive methods In more detail, it is also found that the public is distributed discursively. This article analyzes the logic and patterns of constructing the digital public sphere. The article uses TAM and digital technology theory. It explores public participation.patterns, discourse contest, negotiation, and integration in the context of "discursive" distribution and hierarchical "connection," and proposes the potential of the digital public sphere and initiatives to address new challenges.Additionally, This paper uses qualitative research analysis and case analysis methods for analysis. Furthermore, The limitation in this article is that it uses a large number of descriptions for analysis and qualitative description, and there may be a lack of some substantive cases, which is also limitation. The contribution of this article is mainly to describe the theme content of the digital theme.
Article
Local authorities play a key role in tackling climate change by implementing targeted adaptation and mitigation measures. The specific implementation of a mix of adaptation and mitigation strategies is the outcome of the interaction of policymakers through a political debate and their attitudes towards climate change. By concentrating on the political discourses occurring in the Assembly of an Italian region (Emilia-Romagna), we use a multi-method approach of Discourse Network Analysis and Concept Mapping to investigate local policymakers’ positioning. Our investigation shows that actors are grouped not only according to their political affiliation, but also to the debated topics, and this relates to the preference for supporting adaptation or mitigation measures, which characterizes the local policy debate.
Article
Full-text available
Despite the prevalence of disagreement between users on social media platforms, studies of online debates typically only look at positive online interactions, represented as networks with positive ties. In this paper, we hypothesize that the systematic neglect of conflict that these network analyses induce leads to misleading results on polarized debates. We introduce an approach to bring in negative user-to-user interaction, by analyzing online debates using signed networks with positive and negative ties. We apply this approach to the Dutch Twitter debate on ‘Black Pete’—an annual Dutch celebration with racist characteristics. Using a dataset of 430,000 tweets, we apply natural language processing and machine learning to identify: (i) users’ stance in the debate; and (ii) whether the interaction between users is positive (supportive) or negative (antagonistic). Comparing the resulting signed network with its unsigned counterpart, the retweet network, we find that traditional unsigned approaches distort debates by conflating conflict with indifference, and that the inclusion of negative ties changes and enriches our understanding of coalitions and division within the debate. Our analysis reveals that some groups are attacking each other, while others rather seem to be located in fragmented Twitter spaces. Our approach identifies new network positions of individuals that correspond to roles in the debate, such as leaders and scapegoats. These findings show that representing the polarity of user interactions as signs of ties in networks substantively changes the conclusions drawn from polarized social media activity, which has important implications for various fields studying online debates using network analysis.
Article
Full-text available
This multi-level model of opinion formation considers that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of evaluative associations links different (partially overlapping) sets of facts on different political issues and determines agents’ attitudinal positions in a way borrowed from expectancy value theory. If agents preferentially interact with other agents who hold similar attitudes on one or several issues, this leads to biased argument pools and increasing polarization in the sense that groups of agents selectively believe in distinct subsets of facts. Besides the emergence of a bi-modal distribution of opinions on single issues as most previous opinion polarization models address, our model also accounts for the alignment of attitudes across several issues along ideological dimensions.
Article
Full-text available
How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into people's uses of the city? To answer these questions, we develop a relational approach that relies on a combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. Based on in-depth interviews and a dataset of over 400 000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam, we analyse how the city is reassembled on and through the platform. By selectively drawing on the city, users of the platform elevate exclusive and avant-garde establishments and events, which come to stand out as hot spots, while rendering mundane and low-status places invisible. We find that Instagram provides a space for the segmentation of users into subcultural groups that mobilise the city in varied ways. Social media practices, our findings suggest, feed on as well as perpetuate socio-spatial inequalities.
Article
Full-text available
In this study we investigate how social media shape the networked public sphere and facilitate communication between communities with different political orientations. We examine two networks of political communication on Twitter, comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm elections. Using a combination of network clustering algorithms and manually-annotated data we demonstrate that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right-leaning users. Surprisingly this is not the case for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by a single politically heterogeneous cluster of users in which ideologically-opposed individuals interact at a much higher rate compared to the network of retweets. To explain the distinct topologies of the retweet and mention networks we conjecture that politically motivated individuals provoke interaction by injecting partisan content into information streams whose primary audience consists of ideologically-opposed users. We conclude with statistical evidence in support of this hypothesis.
Article
Full-text available
The rise of the Internet, social media, and digitized historical archives has produced a colossal amount of text-based data in recent years. While computer scientists have produced powerful new tools for automated analyses of such "big data," they lack the theoretical direction necessary to extract meaning from them. Meanwhile, cultural sociologists have produced sophisticated theories of the social origins of meaning, but lack the methodological capacity to explore them beyond micro-levels of analysis. I propose a synthesis of these two fields that adjoins conventional qualitative methods and new techniques for automated analysis of large amounts of text in iterative fashion. First, I explain how automated text extraction methods may be used to map the contours of cultural environments. Second, I discuss the potential of automated text-classification methods to classify different types of culture such as frames, schema, or symbolic boundaries. Finally, I explain how these new tools can be combined with conventional qualitative methods to trace the evolution of such cultural elements over time. While my assessment of the integration of big data and cultural sociology is optimistic, my conclusion highlights several challenges in implementing this agenda. These include a lack of information about the social context in which texts are produced, the construction of reliable coding schemes that can be automated algorithmically, and the relatively high entry costs for cultural sociologists who wish to develop the technical expertise currently necessary to work with big data.
Article
Full-text available
Numerous studies indicate that civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream messages that resonate with prevailing discursive themes. Yet these case studies of highly influential organizations obscure the much larger population that have little or no impact. It is therefore unclear whether civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream discourses or if they become part of the mainstream because of their success. I present an evolutionary theory of how discursive fields settle after major historical ruptures that highlights framing, social networks, and emotional energy. To illustrate this theory, I use plagiarism detection software to compare 1,084 press releases about Muslims produced by 120 civil society organizations to 50,407 newspaper articles and television transcripts produced between 2001 and 2008. Although most organizations deployed pro-Muslim discourses after the September 11th attacks, I show that anti-Muslim fringe organizations dominated the mass media via displays of fear and anger. Institutional amplification of this emotional energy, I argue, created a gravitational pull or "fringe effect" that realigned inter-organizational networks and altered the contours of mainstream discourse itself.
Article
Full-text available
De manier waarop integratie, moslims en minderheden werd besproken en bestuurd veranderde drastisch tussen 1990 en 2005. Maar hoe veranderde het integratiedebat precies, en waarom? En hoe werkten die veranderingen door in het beleid van steden als Amsterdam en Rotterdam? Dit boek gebruikt nieuwe methodes en data om die vragen te beantwoorden. Een analyse van opinieartikelen laat zien dat culturalisten (debatdeelnemers die stellen dat onze 'verlichte', 'liberale', Nederlandse cultuur moet worden beschermd tegen etnische en Islamitische minderheidsculturen) hechtere relaties onderhouden en meer achter hun leiders staan dan hun (talrijke maar gefragmenteerde) tegenstanders. De veranderende machtsverhoudingen in het debat blijken niet één op één door te werken in het lokale beleid. In de periode dat Leefbaar Rotterdam de gemeenteraad domineerde (2002-2006) zijn migrantenorganisaties over de hele linie eerder versterkt dan verzwakt. In het door de sociaal-democraten gedomineerde Amsterdam daarentegen had slechts een klein aantal organisaties invloed en toegang tot subsidies. Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics gaat niet alleen in op deze verrassende resultaten maar ontwikkelt ook een theoretische aanpak - gebaseerd op het werk van Jeffrey Alexander, Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins en Norbert Elias - waarmee snelle politieke omwentelingen kunnen worden ontleed en verklaard. Dit boek is gebaseerd op een proefschrift dat cum laude werd beoordeeld en beloond met de Jaarprijs Politicologie 2011 en de internationale Maria Ioannis Baganha Dissertation Award 2011.
Article
Full-text available
The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). The theory synthesizes work in the sociology of ideas, social studies of science, and the literature on social movements to explain the dynamics of SIMs, which the authors take to be central mechanisms for change in the world of knowledge and ideas. Illustrating their arguments with a diverse sampling of positive and negative cases, they define SIMs, identify a set of theoretical presuppositions, and offer four general propositions for explaining the social conditions under which SIMs are most likely to emerge, gain prestige, and achieve some level of institutional stability.
Article
Full-text available
This article explores the link between violence and public discourse. It suggests that media attention to radical right violence and public reactions to violence affect the clustering of targets and the temporal and spatial distribution of violence. The notion of "discursive opportunities" is introduced, and the article argues that it can serve to link political opportunity structure and framing perspectives on collective action. Using a cross-sectional and time-series design to model event counts in states in Germany, this study finds that differential public visibility, resonance, and legitimacy of right-wing violence significantly affected the rate of violence against different target groups.
Article
Full-text available
Structural balance theory has proven useful for delineating the blockmodel structure of signed social networks. Even so, most of the observed signed networks are not perfectly balanced. One possibility for this is that in examining the dynamics underlying the generation of signed social networks, insufficient attention has been given to other processes and features of signed networks. These include: actors who have positive ties to pairs of actors linked by a negative relation or who belong to two mutually hostile subgroups; some actors that are viewed positively across the network despite the presence of negative ties and subsets of actors with negative ties towards each other. We suggest that instead viewing these situations as violations of structural balance, they can be seen as belonging to other relevant processes we call mediation, differential popularity and internal subgroup hostility. Formalizing these ideas leads to the relaxed structural balance blockmodel as a proper generalization of structural balance blockmodels. Some formal properties concerning the relation between these two models are presented along with the properties of the fitting method proposed for the new blockmodel type. The new method is applied to four empirical data sets where improved fits with more nuanced interpretations are obtained.
Article
Full-text available
We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American online political landscape. Analysis of a network defined by the communication activity of these users in proximity to the 2010 midterm congressional elections reveals a highly segregated, well clustered partisan community structure. Using cluster membership as a high-fidelity (87% accuracy) proxy for political affiliation, we characterize a wide range of differences in the behavior, communication and social connectivity of left- and right-leaning Twitter users. We find that in contrast to the online political dynamics of the 2008 campaign, right-leaning Twitter users exhibit greater levels of political activity, a more tightly interconnected social structure, and a communication network topology that facilitates the rapid and broad dissemination of political information.
Article
Full-text available
Structural balance theory affirms that signed social networks (i.e., graphs whose signed edges represent friendly/hostile interactions among individuals) tend to be organized so as to avoid conflictual situations, corresponding to cycles of negative parity. Using an algorithm for ground-state calculation in large-scale Ising spin glasses, in this paper we compute the global level of balance of very large online social networks and verify that currently available networks are indeed extremely balanced. This property is explainable in terms of the high degree of skewness of the sign distributions on the nodes of the graph. In particular, individuals linked by a large majority of negative edges create mostly "apparent disorder," rather than true "frustration."
Article
Full-text available
The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing real systems is community structure, or clustering, i. e. the organization of vertices in clusters, with many edges joining vertices of the same cluster and comparatively few edges joining vertices of different clusters. Such clusters, or communities, can be considered as fairly independent compartments of a graph, playing a similar role like, e. g., the tissues or the organs in the human body. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. This problem is very hard and not yet satisfactorily solved, despite the huge effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on it over the past few years. We will attempt a thorough exposition of the topic, from the definition of the main elements of the problem, to the presentation of most methods developed, with a special focus on techniques designed by statistical physicists, from the discussion of crucial issues like the significance of clustering and how methods should be tested and compared against each other, to the description of applications to real networks. Comment: Review article. 103 pages, 42 figures, 2 tables. Two sections expanded + minor modifications. Three figures + one table + references added. Final version published in Physics Reports
Article
Full-text available
The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be seen as a nonlinear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks, where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social interactions, however, the multidimensional nature of these interactions has largely been ignored, mostly because of lack of data. Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multirelational, large social network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering, and fatter-tail degree distribution. We then explore how the interdependence of different network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular, we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach, we present the first empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity relations.
Article
Illustrates relational approaches to the study of social movements and collective action. Contributors analyse most recent developments in the analysis of the role of networks as facilitators or constraints of individual recruitment, various forms of interorganizational networks, and the relationship between social networks and the political context in which social movements operate. They also relate the growing attention to social networks by social movement analysis to broader theoretical debates. Both quantitative and qualitative network analysis are considered, and attention is paid to the time dimension and the evolution of networks, through both simulation models and empirical data. Empirical chapters cover both contemporary and historical episodes of collective action, in reference to authoritarian as well as progressive, left-libertarian movements. Chapters focusing on individual networks specify different effects of network embeddedness over participation in different types of collective action (Passy, Anheier). Interorganizational relations are explored by looking at leadership dynamics (Diani), the relationship between categorical traits and network position within coalitions (Ansell), and the role of individuals in linking different organizations both synchronically and diachronically (Osa). Network approaches to the political process illustrate shifts in alliance and conflict networks at a time of regime change (Tilly and Wood), the evolution of social networks during protest cycles (Oliver and Myers), and the role of local elites in shaping protest networks in the community (Broadbent). Theoretical chapters discuss network perspectives on social movements in relation to recent theoretical developments in rational choice theory (Gould), cultural analysis (Mische), and the analysis of social mechanisms (McAdam). A radical case is also made for a reorientation of the whole social movement agenda along network lines (Diani).
Article
Social movements have an elusive power but one that is altogether real. From the French and American revolutions to the post-Soviet, ethnic, and terrorist movements of today, contentious politics exercises a fleeting but powerful influence on politics, society, and international relations. This study surveys the modern history of the modern social movements in the West and their diffusion to the global South through war, colonialism, and diffusion, and it puts forward a theory to explain its cyclical surges and declines. It offers an interpretation of the power of movements that emphasizes effects on the lives of militants, policy reforms, political institutions, and cultural change. The book focuses on the rise and fall of social movements as part of contentious politics in general and as the outcome of changes in political opportunities and constraints, state strategy, the new media of communication, and transnational diffusion.
Article
Significance A synoptic picture of the evolution of American politics is presented, based on analysis of the corpus of presidents’ State of the Union addresses, 1790–2014. The paper presents a strategy for automated text analysis that can identify meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long durées , where terms, concepts and language use changes, and evolution of topical structure is a priori unknown. Discourse streams identified as river networks reveal how change in contents masks continuity in the articulation of the major tasks of governance over US history.
Article
This article offers a comprehensive empirical analysis of the determinants of social movement mobilization, with serious consideration of countermovement leadership and infrastructure on terms comparable with those of the movement. The authors examine the role of resources, infrastructure, and leadership in tenant mobilization in the Los Angeles tenants’ rights movement between 1976 and 1979. Using survey and census data along with archival materials, they compare neighborhoods across Los Angeles and find a significant role for resources, infrastructure, and leadership; notably, the authors find that countermovement infrastructure and leadership are more important to renter mobilization than movement infrastructure and leadership.
Book
Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies
Article
Menigeen kent het begrip 'verzuiling' en weet hoezeer dat verschijnsel bepalend is geweest voor de inrichting en werkwijze van de Nederlandse politiek, vakbonden, omroep, dagbladpers, etc. in de afgelopen honderd jaar.Weinigen realiseren zich hoe die verzuiling precies is ontstaan en op welke wijze en met welke gevolgen de 'verzuildheid' Nederland gedurende een groot deel van de twintigste eeuw heeft bepaald. In zijn klassiek geworden studie Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek uit 1967 geeft Dr. A. Lijphart een uniek politiek portret van ons land sinds 1917.
Article
Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static ''things'' or in dynamic, unfolding relations. Rational-actor and norm-based models, diverse holisms and structuralisms, and statistical ''variable'' analyses continue implicitly or explicitly to prefer the former point of view. By contrast, this ''manifesto'' presents an alternative, ''relational'' perspective, first in broad, philosophical outlines, then by exploring its implications for both theory and empirical research. In the closing pages, it ponders some of the difficulties and challenges now facing relational analysis, taking up in turn the issues of boundaries and entities, network dynamics, causality, and normative implications.
Article
Media discourse and public opinion are treated as two parallel systems of constructing meaning. This paper explores their relationship by analyzing the discourse on nuclear power in four general audience media: television news coverage, newsmagazine accounts, editorial cartoons, and syndicated opinion columns. The analysis traces the careers of different interpretive packages on nuclear power from 1945 to the present. This media discourse, it is argued, is an essential context for understanding the formation of public opinion on nuclear power. More specifically, it helps to account for such survey results as the decline in support for nuclear power before Three Mile Island, a rebound after a burst of media publicity has died out, the gap between general support for nuclear power and support for a plant in one's own community, and the changed relationship of age to support for nuclear power from 1950 to the present.
Article
In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.
Article
This article argues that the decisive part of the interaction between social movements and political authorities is no longer the direct, physical confrontation between them in concrete locations, but the indirect, mediated encounters among contenders in the arena of the mass media public sphere. Authorities react to social movement activities if and as they are depicted in the mass media, and conversely movement activists become aware of political opportunities and constraints through the reactions (or non-reactions) that their actions provoke in the public sphere. The dynamics of this mediated interaction among political contenders can be analyzed as an evolutionary process. Of the great variety of attempts to mobilize public attention, only a few can be accommodated in the bounded media space. Three selection mechanisms–labelled here as discursive opportunities– can be identified that affect the diffusion chances of contentious messages: visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others – allies, opponents, authorities, etc.–react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive). The argument is empirically illustrated by showing how the strategic repertoire of the German radical right evolved over the course of the 1990s as a result of the differential reactions that various strategies encountered in the mass media arena.
Article
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical largescale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want. Keywords World Wide Web, Search Engines, Information Retrieval, PageRank, Google 1.
Book
This article argues that the massive differentialist turn of the last third of the twentieth century may have reached its peak, and that one can discern signs of a modest "return of assimilation". The article presents evidence of this from the domain of public discourse in France, public policy in Germany, and scholarly research in the US. Yet what has "returned" is not the old, analytically discredited and politically disreputable "assimilationist" understanding of assimilation, but a more analytically complex and normatively defensible understanding. The article concludes by specifying the ways in which the concept of assimilation has been transformed.
Conference Paper
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/ To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from 3 years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine - the first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections, where anyone can publish anything they want.
Article
It is not uncommon for certain social networks to divide into two opposing camps in response to stress. This happens, for example, in networks of political parties during winner-takes-all elections, in networks of companies competing to establish technical standards, and in networks of nations faced with mounting threats of war. A simple model for these two-sided separations is the dynamical system dX/dt = X(2), where X is a matrix of the friendliness or unfriendliness between pairs of nodes in the network. Previous simulations suggested that only two types of behavior were possible for this system: Either all relationships become friendly or two hostile factions emerge. Here we prove that for generic initial conditions, these are indeed the only possible outcomes. Our analysis yields a closed-form expression for faction membership as a function of the initial conditions and implies that the initial amount of friendliness in large social networks (started from random initial conditions) determines whether they will end up in intractable conflict or global harmony.
Article
We measure polarization in the United States Congress using the network science concept of modularity. Modularity provides a conceptually-clear measure of polarization that reveals both the number of relevant groups and the strength of inter-group divisions without making restrictive assumptions about the structure of the party system or the shape of legislator utilities. We show that party influence on Congressional blocs varies widely throughout history, and that existing measures underestimate polarization in periods with weak party structures. We demonstrate that modularity is a significant predictor of changes in majority party and that turnover is more prevalent at medium levels of modularity. We show that two variables related to modularity, called `divisiveness' and `solidarity,' are significant predictors of reelection success for individual House members. Our results suggest that modularity can serve as an early warning of changing group dynamics, which are reflected only later by changes in party labels.
Article
In many Western countries, rights that once belonged solely to citizens are being extended to immigrants, a trend that challenges the nature and basis of citizenship at a time when nation-states are fortifying their boundaries through restirictive border controls and expressions of nationalist ideologies. In this book, Yasemin Soysal compares the different ways European nations incorporate immigrants, how these policies evolved, and how they are influenced by international human rights discourse. Soysal focuses on postwar international migration, paying particular attention to "guestworkers." Taking an in-depth look at France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, she identifies three major patterns that reflect the varying emphasis particular states place on individual versus corporate groups as the basis for incorporation. She finds that the global expansion and intensification of human rights discourse puts nation-states under increasing outside pressure to extend membership rights to aliens, resulting in an increasingly blurred line between citizen and noncitizen. Finally, she suggests a possible accommodation to these shifts: specifically, a model of post-national membership that derives its legitimacy from universal personhood, rather than national belonging. This fresh approach to the study of citizenship, rights, and immigration will be invaluable to anyone involved in issues of human rights, international migration, and transnational cultural interactions, as well as to those who study the contemporary transformation of the nation-state, nationalism, and globalization.
Article
We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of edges connecting them. Previous work indicates that a robust approach to this problem is the maximization of the benefit function known as "modularity" over possible divisions of a network. Here we show that this maximization process can be written in terms of the eigenspectrum of a matrix we call the modularity matrix, which plays a role in community detection similar to that played by the graph Laplacian in graph partitioning calculations. This result leads us to a number of possible algorithms for detecting community structure, as well as several other results, including a spectral measure of bipartite structure in networks and a centrality measure that identifies vertices that occupy central positions within the communities to which they belong. The algorithms and measures proposed are illustrated with applications to a variety of real-world complex networks.
Article
"Invisible colleges" may be consistent throughout science.
Framing Immigration and Integration: Facts, Parliament Media and Anti-immigrant Party Support in the Netherlands
  • R Vliegenthart
Vliegenthart, R., (PhD thesis) 2007. Framing Immigration and Integration: Facts, Parliament Media and Anti-immigrant Party Support in the Netherlands. Vrije Universiteit http://dare.ubvu.vu.nl.
The political blogosphere and the 2005 U.S. election: divided they blog
  • L Adamic
  • N Glance
Adamic, L., Glance, N., 2005. The political blogosphere and the 2005 U.S. election: divided they blog. In: LinkKDD'05: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery, pp. 36-43.
What is Sociology? Columbia University Press
  • N Elias
Elias, N., 1978[1970]. What is Sociology? Columbia University Press, New York.
Integratie van minderheden moet met lef worden aangepakt
  • F Bolkestein
Bolkestein, F., 1991. Integratie van minderheden moet met lef worden aangepakt. De Volkskrant September.
The Established and the Outsiders Manifesto for a relational sociology
  • N Elias
  • J Scotson
Elias, N., Scotson, J., 1994[1965]. The Established and the Outsiders. Sage, London. Emirbayer, M., 1997. Manifesto for a relational sociology. Am. J. Sociol. 103, 281-317.
The Cement of Civil Society
  • M Diani
Diani, M., 2015. The Cement of Civil Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Bolkestein tegen de rest
  • C Van Praag
Van Praag, C., 1992. Bolkestein tegen de rest. Soc. Democr. 49, 409-417.
Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Ethnic Relations Politics in Europe
  • R Koopmans
  • P Statham
  • M Giugni
Koopmans, R., Statham, P., Giugni, M., Passy, F. (Eds.), 2005. Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Ethnic Relations Politics in Europe. Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis.