State Embeddedness and Field Stability: The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street's

Interorganizational Networks

Benjamin E. LindB. Remy Cross

Georgy Mkrtchyan

Presentation Outline● Hypothesis: interactions with state embedded actors increase field stability,

yet this effect decreases with the field's level of abstraction;

● Case studies: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street;

● Data: Through the New York Times's API, article co appearance networks were produced;

● Analysis: we used triadic closure propensities and average coreness;

● Key Findings: Tea Party’s closest affiliations are more stable than those of Occupy Wall Street’s ;

Theoretical Background

Organizational fields - sets of organizations that, in agregate, constitute a

recognized area of institutional life;

We identify fields based upon dense network ties and use structural cohesion

to characterize the stability within the fields (Powell, White, Koput, and Owen -

Smith 2005);

We analyze field stability alongside “movement centric” subgroups generated

from network neighborhoods;

Case Overviews: The Tea party

Hailed as a spontaneous grassroots movement (2009) to oppose a variety of issues: the election of Barack Obama, health care reform, and increased taxation;

Was able to make linkages with institutionally powerful organizations within its field;

Data: from February 27, 2009 to November 2, 2010.

Case Overviews: Occupy Wall Street

Movements focused on social justice and the alleviation of income and other inequalities;

Occupy Wall Street was also quick to refuse joining from national political figures during this time, instead choosing to allow local occupation groups to retain a high degree of autonomy;

Data contains the first organized protest on September 17, 2011 until March 17, 2012.

Data: Crawling technique

Louvain Community Distribution1 2 3 4 5

We collected the articles tagging the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street

After it we search for a near population of articles with organizational tags through a network crawling technique:

Identified additional organizations Search for tagging Delete duplicate

articlesSample’s second wave Repeate 2-4 steps

Our Networks

Analysis

Community DetectionMethod: “the Louvain method”, detects communities by optimizing modularity in a hierarchical manner, looping through levels of aggregation.

Subgroups

Method: “the Louvain method”, we find value in comparing “movement-centric” and “field -centric” analyses.

Stability

Method: “Global clustering coefficient”, measure triadic effect.

Analysis: Louvain Community Distribution

Most fields include few organizations, especially at the lowest levels of aggregation.

Analyses: Comparing Subgroup Stability

Hypothesis:

● Due to its state embedded affiliations, TP’s fields and neighborhoods should demonstrate greater stability than those of OWS

● These differences should be most pronounced among the smaller, more specific fields (Level 1) than the larger, more abstract fields (Level 3).

The global clustering coefficient is significantly greater for TP relative to OWS within the Level 1 fields as well as the first and second order neighborhoods.

The effect size decreases as the level of abstraction increases.

Analyses: Triadic Closure within Fields and Neighborhoods

Analyses: CorenessTable 3. k- Core Means within Fields (by Level) and Neighborhoods (by Order)

Analyses: CorenessTable 4 . k -Core Medians within Fields (by Level) and Neighborhoods (by Order)

Analyses: Coreness

We use two sets tests for stability tests on coreness.

For all community levels and neighborhoods analyzed we find that the mean coreness for OWS’s subnetworks is significantly less than those of TP.

The median coreness scores from each of TP’s networks exceed those of OWS.

This effect did not weaken for the second order neighborhood.

The median coreness score of TP’s third order neighborhood typically exceeds OWS’s (about 60% of the simulations).

Conclusions

1. The fields and neighborhoods pertaining to the Tea Party are more stable than those of Occupy Wall Street. The accuracy of this conclusion largely depends upon the level of abstraction.

2. The most specific communities (Level 1) and the neighborhoods nearest the analyzed movements (first order) match this empirical statement very closely. The most general communities (Level 3) and farthest neighborhoods (third order) display either relatively weaker, non significant, or contrary effects.

3. Our strongest findings that the Tea Party’s closest affiliations are more stable than those of Occupy Wall Street’s holds for both our operationalization of fields as well as path based operationalizations of subgroups.