Week 12 (Apr 3, 5):
Tuesday     Ideology and Politics at the Eleventh-Century Court

Study Guide:

  • Read Bol’s “Government, Society, and State,” and consider: What split Wang An-shih [Wang Anshi] and his opponents, such as Ssu-ma Kuang [Sima Guang] at the eleventh-century court? What the political visions of each?
  • Read Gingras’s article. Consider:
    • What conclusions does Gingras draw from his study? What data does he use?
    • Compare Gingras’s work with Healy’s work on Paul Revere. Both take a network approach to solving a historical problem, but they use the network approach in different ways. What structural properties of a network does each focus on?
  • Think over Bol’s and Gingras’s articles. Exercise your imagination. How may network analysis be fruitfully applied to the study of court politics?
  • If you are ambitious enough, skim the suggested (i.e. optional) reading: Chapter 11 in Hanneman’s Introduction to Social Network Methods. What is a clique? What problems do network analysts encounter when they try to identify cliques in a network? What solutions have they come up with?

Thursday   Network Analysis in the Study of Elite Politics

Study Guide:

  • Read Padgett and Ansell’s classical study of the Medici family. Consider: What, according to the authors, led to the rise of the Medici’s? What type of network data have they used in this study? What methods of analysis have they applied to these data?
  • Read Strange’s more exploratory study of factional struggles at the Song court. Does his conclusion contradict that of Peter Bol, whom you read for Tuesday? How did Strange reach his conclusion?