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Public management and policy scholars have empirically demonstrated that in complex policy arenas, governments depend on the collaboration of policy actors outside their direct control to produce needed goods and services. Government‐sponsored shared‐cost programs are one of the premier mechanisms to foster such cooperation, yet little is known about the inner patterns of participation in such programs and whether they are conditional on specific resource needs that partners may have. In this article, I study the participation of organizations in projects seeking funds from the Cooperative Funding Initiative, a program sponsored by the Southwest Florida Water Management District that finances projects dealing with the management of water resources. Through the estimation of a series of Exponential Random Graph Models in the networks that form when organizations participate in projects (two‐mode networks), I show that centralization around popular organizations results in greater bridging network capital, which facilitates the flow of nonoverlapping information from project to project. I analyze the implications of these findings and discuss how the formation of these bridging structures may enhance the capacity of the program to find innovative solutions to the problems the projects are designed to deal with.

AbstractThe majority of Ph.D. programs in political science in the United States provide some kind of teaching training for graduate students, which ranges from assisting other instructors to designing and teaching new courses. In most cases, departments make an effort to guide these students in their new role as instructors; however, first-time teachers whose first language is not English do not usually receive any special guidance on how to successfully address the challenge of communicating effectively with their students—an all-too-real problem for many foreign instructors. This article provides some basic tips for improving the communication process that develops in the classroom, and is particularly tailored for individuals whose first language is not English and who are about to take the first steps of their teaching careers.

A number of indicators signal a growing interest in the study of political phenomena from a network perspective in the United States, such as the growing number of published articles with a network focus in the discipline's top-tier journals and the creation of a new Political Networks section of the APSA in 2008. Yet another notable indicator is the organization of a new annual conference financially supported by the National Science Foundation—the Political Networks conference. The meeting not only brings together scholars who study networks in political science, but also fosters collaboration across disciplines by encouraging participation of non–political scientists with the goal of achieving more comprehensive answers to questions that cannot be properly answered within the confines of individual disciplines.

This study tests hypotheses linking the structural characteristics of policy networks to the feelings of trust of their members. A social capital perspective suggests that actors in denser networks should trust others more, while an alternative 'centrality' approach suggests that trust may be a byproduct of the occupation of key positions in the group. The author tests these expectations with data mapping policy networks in twenty-two estuaries in the United States and finds that centrality is a better predictor of trust. This opens room for questioning the real value of trust as a necessary ingredient in the solution of collective action dilemmas. Adapted from the source document.

Do organizations with more collaborative partners perform better than organizations with fewer partners? And is this relationship conditional on the ability of those partners to provide nonredundant resources from their network of contact with other actors? This article answers these questions with data describing the participation of governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the Cooperative Funding Initiative (CFI), a program sponsored by the one of the five water management districts in Florida. Results show a positive relationship between the inclusion of more partners in a project and the chances of getting funded, but also that once the project becomes too inclusive; those chances decrease if the partners fill more structural holes (e.g., provide more nonredundant resources). In other words, organizations perform better by adding more partners as long as this addition does not result in excessive complexity. These results are valuable for the growing community of policy scholars seeking to understand the specific conditions under which collaborative behavior positively affects organizational performance.

This study tests hypotheses linking the structural characteristics of policy networks to the feelings of trust of their members. A social capital perspective suggests that actors in denser networks should trust others more, while an alternative "centrality" approach suggests that trust may be a byproduct of the occupation of key positions in the group. The author tests these expectations with data mapping policy networks in twenty-two estuaries in the United States and finds that centrality is a better predictor of trust. This opens room for questioning the real value of trust as a necessary ingredient in the solution of collective action dilemmas.