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AbstractInteractions between units in political systems often occur across multiple relational contexts. These relational systems feature interdependencies that result in inferential shortcomings and poorly-fitting models when ignored. General advancements in inferential network analysis have improved our ability to understand relational systems featuring interdependence, but developments specific to working with interdependence that cross relational contexts remain sparse. In this paper, I introduce a multilayer network approach to modeling systems comprising multiple relations using the exponential random graph model. In two substantive applications, the first a policy communication network and the second a global conflict network, I demonstrate that the multilayer approach affords inferential leverage and produces models that better fit observed data.

In 2005, the single nontransferable vote system for legislative elections in Taiwan was replaced by a mixed-member majoritarian system, with an accompanying reduction in available district seats. In theory, by increasing the threshold of exclusion and placing the power of nomination in the hands of political parties, this reform should reduce vote-buying and local factionalism. We collected data on legislative nominees charged with vote-buying and on the local factional ties of candidates. Our results suggest that the reforms did reduce these problems. First, comparing the proportion of candidates charged with vote-buying before and after the reform shows a decrease in the second and third post-reform elections. Second, factional status predicts a candidate's likelihood of running in consecutive elections before the reform but not after. Differences between factional and nonfactional candidates ceased to be significant after the reform, revealing the decreasing relevance of factions.

Abstract
Characterising the spreading of ideas within echo chambers is essential for understanding polarisation. In this article, we explore the characteristics of popular and viral content in climate change discussions on Twitter around the 2019 announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, where we find the retweet network of users to be polarised into two well-separated groups of activists and sceptics. Operationalising popularity as the number of retweets and virality as the spreading probability inferred using an independent cascade model, we find that the viral themes echo and differ from the popular themes in interesting ways. Most importantly, we find that the most viral themes in the two groups reflect different types of bonds that tie the community together, yet both function to enhance ingroup connections while repulsing outgroup engagement. With this, our study sheds light, from an information-spreading perspective, on the formation and upkeep of echo chambers in climate discussions.

AbstractSocial media is an important arena for policy contestation. Although online social media debates can yield notable power over political processes offline, little research has examined the relationship between policy actors' influence in offline policymaking and social media policy arenas. We explore the relationship between four types of influence: reputational and formal‐institutional influence offline, and broadcasting and boosting influence online. We ask (1) are influential policy actors better able than others to broadcast their own messages on social media? and (2) are they better able than others to boost the broadcasting influence of other policy actors in social media? Using exponential random graph models on survey and Twitter data from the Finnish climate policy domain, we find that actors with high reputational influence in offline policymaking are also influential online, when measuring influence as the ability to broadcast one's own message. The pattern does not hold for those with formal‐institutional influence offline. Additionally, offline influence does not translate to the ability to further shape online influence by making boosting other actors' visibility. Our results suggest that although online influence partially corresponds to influence in policymaking, influence varies across arenas of policy contestation.

AbstractThe significance and influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions derive in large part from opinions' roles as precedents for future opinions. A growing body of literature seeks to understand what drives the use of opinions as precedents through the study of Supreme Court case citation patterns. We raise two limitations of existing work on Supreme Court citations. First, dyadic citations are typically aggregated to the case level before they are analyzed. Second, citations are treated as if they arise independently. We present a methodology for studying citations between Supreme Court opinions at the dyadic level, as a network, that overcomes these limitations. This methodology—the citation exponential random graph model, for which we provide user-friendly software—enables researchers to account for the effects of case characteristics and complex forms of network dependence in citation formation. We then analyze a network that includes all Supreme Court cases decided between 1950 and 2015. We find evidence for dependence processes, including reciprocity, transitivity, and popularity. The dependence effects are as substantively and statistically significant as the effects of exogenous covariates, indicating that models of Supreme Court citations should incorporate both the effects of case characteristics and the structure of past citations.

AbstractIn order to better understand the individual-level motives for ticket-splitting, Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study has since 2001 included a question aimed at measuring respondents' preferences for checks and balances. We argue that this set of questions, designed to measure a combination of Fiorina's policy-balancing hypothesis and Ladd's cognitive Madisonianism, is inconsistent with principles of survey methodology and thus produces data that are suboptimal. Following a method developed by Carsey and Layman, we propose an alternative concept, the policy-balancing index derived from the perceived ideological distance between respondent and political parties, which both avoids methodological violations and provides us with a more precise concept to work with. We test the index and find it to be a significant determinant of ticket-splitting behavior.

Increasingly, countries around the world are adopting policies that emphasize the importance of partnerships for disaster resilience. The overarching questions that this paper investigates are how to form and sustain (1) effective collaborative arrangements involving governments, businesses, non‐governmental organizations and communities to ensure development of disaster resilient communities, and (2) governance institutions that can effectively mobilize geographically dispersed disaster response resources with fragmented ownership. We have reviewed case studies of alternative inter‐sectoral collaborative arrangements that were formed to (1) promote the development of resilient communities and critical physical and social systems; (2) mitigate or respond to emerging crises; or (3) facilitate post‐disaster recovery and learning. We have developed grounded propositions articulating the antecedents of performance of inter‐sectoral collaborative arrangements.

Funding Information: We thank Risto Kunelius, Boyoon Lee, Kevin Reuning, Pertti Vehkalahti, and participants of the 2019 Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks Workshop held at the University of Bern for useful feedback. This research is produced under the ECANET consortium (Echo Chambers, Experts and Activists: Networks of Mediated Political Communication) funded by the Academy of Finland, Grant Nos. 320780 (TY) and 320781 (MK). Additional funding comes from the Kone Foundation (AG; Grant No. 201804137) and the Strategic Research Council, Academy of Finland (TY; Grant No. 312710). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s) ; Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which the political polarization literature identifies as among the most deleterious aspects of polarization. Using a network approach and social media data from the Twitter platform, we study polarization of public opinion toward climate politics and ten other politically salient topics during the 2019 Finnish elections as the emergence of opposing groups in a public forum. We find that while climate politics is not particularly polarized compared to the other topics, it is subject to partisan sorting and issue alignment within the universalist-communitarian dimension of European politics that arose following the growth of right-wing populism. Notably, climate politics is consistently aligned with the immigration issue, and temporal trends indicate that this phenomenon will likelypersist. ; Peer reviewed

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s) ; Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which the political polarization literature identifies as among the most deleterious aspects of polarization. Using a network approach and social media data from the Twitter platform, we study polarization of public opinion toward climate politics and ten other politically salient topics during the 2019 Finnish elections as the emergence of opposing groups in a public forum. We find that while climate politics is not particularly polarized compared to the other topics, it is subject to partisan sorting and issue alignment within the universalist-communitarian dimension of European politics that arose following the growth of right-wing populism. Notably, climate politics is consistently aligned with the immigration issue, and temporal trends indicate that this phenomenon will likely persist. ; Peer reviewed