Policy Network Analysis

In the Rhodes-Marsh continuum, a policy community is a tightly integrated, stable and exclusive network with a limited number of members who share basic values, exchange resources frequently and exclude outsiders; it tends to produce consensual, incremental policy. An issue network is the opposite pole: a large, loose, unstable and open set of participants with fluctuating contact and limited consensus, associated with more contested and volatile policy. Most real networks fall somewhere between these ideal types, and locating a network on the continuum is a central task of the qualitative tradition.

Social-network analysis is the general methodology for studying relationships among any set of entities, with formal measures such as density, centrality and clustering. Policy network analysis applies these ideas to governance, treating policy actors as nodes and their resource exchanges or interactions as ties. The qualitative British tradition uses the network idea more as an organising metaphor and typology, while the quantitative strand uses the full apparatus of social-network analysis to measure structure rigorously and relate it to outcomes. The two strands increasingly converge.

Because networks do not have natural edges, the analyst must decide who is in and who is out, and that decision can strongly shape the measured structure and the conclusions drawn. Include too few actors and you may miss the ties that matter; include too many and the network's distinctive features blur. Boundary specification should therefore be explicit and justified — by a positional criterion (formal membership), a reputational one (whom insiders name) or an event-based one (participation in decisions) — and analysts should test how sensitive their findings are to these choices.