RESEARCH

Using a novel dataset on legislators and roll-call votes in the New York State Assembly after the U.S. Constitution took effect in 1789, we reevaluate prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system. Contrary to existing accounts, we find that legislative parties had already formed at this early stage, yet they did not arise from the politicization of social cleavages such as occupation or wealth, as sociologists might expect, nor were they merely networks of notables disconnected from the polity, as political scientists and historians have suggested. Instead, these parties coalesced around formal issues—structural questions that determined the rules of the game for future contests. Parties emerged, we argue, not because of an inherent need to adjudicate conflicts between sectors of the polity, but because of the organizational affordances of the modern democratic state. Our findings suggest that the formation of party systems is an integral part of the formation of the modern state.

The study of political conflict often assumes that individuals’ social ties determine their political actions. While this structuralist approach has been successful in many contexts, it struggles to account for the actions of political elites, whose power depends on maintaining strategic flexibility. Political divisions among elites are largely endogenous to the political process and cannot be reduced to social position. Building on recent developments in social network theory, this paper advances an “action-in-networks” approach that, rather than using networks to predict sides, focuses on the dynamics of side-taking—how elites make, maintain, and sever ties to navigate the political field. We illustrate this perspective through a case study of John Williams, a key political figure in early New York who switched from the Republican to the Federalist Party in 1795. Using a dataset of over 300 personal letters, we show that Williams’ switch was not a predictable outcome of his network position but a strategic move that triggered a reconfiguration of his political and social relationships. Our analysis reveals three key insights: (1) Political elites operate in multiple, intersecting networks. (2) Political action involves not only the making but also the strategic breaking of ties to create new opportunities. (3) Political action is shaped by broader cultural logics embedded in social relations. By the late 1790s, partisanship had displaced older forms of patron-clientelism. Williams, who perhaps did not fully understand this change, found himself trapped in an uneasy alliance—one that ultimately undermined his political prospects.

Social scientists have long been interested in elite cohesion in American society, recognizing its potential implications for democracy and governance. While empirical research has focused on corporate elites and, in particular, on cohesion derived from shared board memberships, cohesion among those in highest positions in the American state and historical change in that cohesion have been little studied. Drawing on a novel dataset of the career histories of 2,221 people in these elite positions who were appointed to them between 1898 and 1998, I examine whether administrative elites, prior to their elite appointment, attended the same educational institutions or worked in the same agencies of the federal government at the same time. I find evidence of increasing elite cohesion during the twentieth century. Educational cohesion increases significantly in the three decades following the Second World War and then declines slightly toward the end of the century. This increase goes hand in hand with a change from college to graduate education as the primary site generating educational cohesion. Federal government workplace cohesion increases markedly in the 1930s and 1940s and then remains high. As people are appointed to different organizations within the American state, their educational and workplace connections create inter-agency networks that, it is expected, facilitate mutual understanding and coordination and thus help integrate the American administrative state.

What explains career advancement and success within organizations? While existing research tends to attribute career outcomes to individual attributes, this study offers a complementary account that emphasizes how centralized personnel management strategies shape careers. We develop this account in a study of career mobility in the Chinese party-state during the reform period (1978-2011). Drawing on a unique dataset of over 5,000 career histories of Chinese political elites and using vacancy chains as a novel measure of strategic job transfers, we show that officials involved in longer chains of orchestrated intraorganizational transfers were more likely to be promoted within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This relationship holds after controlling for personal attributes and social capital, is stronger for younger officials, and aligns with the timeline of China’s economic reforms. We interpret these findings as evidence that the CCP pursued a strategy of “organizational sponsorship,” in which promising young officials were rotated among subdivisions to develop them like pieces in a chess game. This strategy was a response to increasing organizational decentralization, aligning officials’ careers with the Party’s evolving goals. The study offers a novel framework for understanding job mobility in centralized bureaucracies, highlighting how organizational strategies shape individual career trajectories.

The Florentine *Consulte e Pratiche* is the oldest recorded series of speech-by-speech policy discussion by political elites in European history, over one hundred and fifty years in length. This article is the first of an extended two-article sequence on political discussion in the *Consulte e Pratiche*, during the 1376–1378 period of the War of Eight Saints, which led up to the famous Ciompi Revolt. Our interest is in discovering both the semantic- network (article 1) and the factional-network (article 2) mechanics of this unexpected spillover from foreign-policy conflict into domestic revolt. Our central finding at the semantic level, in this first article, is that the spillover from war to revolution was mediated through the ceremonial and political-economy sides of religion. The methodology in this first article is to uncover the evolving narrative-network structures exhibited in Florentine political discussion – namely, changing inter-correlations among keywords about topics, through chapters and subplots. "Narrative-network analysis" for us means (a) uncovering changing topological portraits of how subplots interlink through time, and (b) discovering interlocking linguistic "hinges" through which new historical trajectories of subplot combinations become defined. In our case, the linguistic hinges between foreign policy and domestic revolt were rooted in religion. How the evolving issues and topics discussed in this article express themselves in domestic (and eventually violent) political conflict between the anti-war Parte Guelfa faction and the pro-war Civic ‘faction’ will be the subject of the second of this complementary pair of articles.

We analyze public-policy speeches in the Florentine *Consulte e Pratiche*, immediately prior to the Ciompi Revolt, for signs of elite factional conflict, in the context of self-proclaimed unity. We employ three statistical analyses of these speeches in Latin: namely, scatterplots of word frequencies, Wordfish scaling, and regressions on speech-similarities. Plus we employ two qualitative analyses: a case study of the speeches of Lapo da Castiglionchio, leader of the Parte Guelfa faction, and a close examination of the rhetoric of unity in three important sets of meetings. Our main finding is this: The runup to the Ciompi Revolt was crystalization of "unity of citizens" in the room of the *Consulte e Pratiche* and, among the same actors, crystallization of "unity of Guelfs" in the room of the Parte Guelfa, with a lack of recognition in the multivocal speeches in the former of the obvious contradiction with actions in the latter. In our opinion, the tragedy of "the valiant failure of republicanism" in Florence was that intense wishful yearning for unity in speech induced, under background conditions of deep social-class contestation about "Who is Florence?," an intensification in action of the very revolutionary forces that it most desperately wanted to suppress.

It is common for social scientists to use formal quantitative methods to compare ecological units such as towns, schools, or nations. In many cases, the size of these units in terms of the number of individuals subsumed in each differs substantially. When the variables in question are counts, there is generally some attempt to neutralize differences in size by turning variables into ratios or by controlling for size. But methods that are appropriate in many demographic and epidemiological contexts have been used in settings where they may not be justified and may well introduce spurious relations between variables. We suggest local regressions as a simple diagnostic and generalized additive models as a superior modeling strategy, with double-residualized regressions as a backup for certain cases.

While much of economic sociology has been interested in how culture shapes economic networks, there has been less attention to how economic networks shape culture. In this chapter, we focus on the case of political culture. Surveying literature in political and economic sociology and history, we argue that there are general patterns that link formal characteristics of economic networks (whether actors have direct ties or occupy structurally equivalent positions, whether relations are voluntary or involuntary) to aspects of political culture (whether it is particularistic or universalistic, whether it is conflictual or pacific). We discuss how these patterns vary for elite and non-elite political actors, and conclude with some preliminary generalizations about the relationship between economic and political relations that can guide future exploration.