1. Online Social Capital in Political Contexts:
Does the ”Online” Make Any Difference
SNA Summer School 20131
Javier Sajuria
Department of Political Science Science
University College London
August 2013
1
Paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2224874
Slides: http://slidesha.re/17x6DeV
3. What is Social Capital?
”Social networks that operate under norms of trust and
reciprocity, and able to mobilise resources and information. ”
4. Based on this definition, my doctoral
research attempts to cover three dimensions
of social capital:
• Networks operating under norms of trust and reciprocity
• Resources
• Outcomes
5. ”Social Capital Dichotomies”
• Individual vs. Collective
• Network structure (brokerage and closure)
• Offline and online → Internet as a research framework
6. Social Capital NetworkTheory
(Burt 2005)
• Closure: Tight groups → norms → trust
Operationalisation: average clustering coefficient
• Brokerage: bridges across structural holes → mobilise
resources across the network
Operationalisation: average network constraint index
7. Data and Methods
• Occupy Research Project Datasets
www.occupyresearch.net
• #OWS
• #OccupyWallStreet
• #OccupyOakland
• #OccupyBoston
• #OccupyLondon
• September/October 2011 to February 2012
• Twitter Streaming API (for a discussion on the representativeness
of the streaming API, check Morstatter et al. 2013)
• Social network analysis using gephi, R (igraph, rgexf)
11. Concluding thoughts
• Interplay between brokerage and closure seems consistent
with theory
• Closure is low → if there is social capital here, where is
trust created?
• Offline interactions → We can’t see where it is created
• Bonding and Bridging Social Capital
• Conceptual problem → there is no social capital here, just
interactions with no trust
• Utopian rhetoric
• Network performance → if social capital is related with
successful networks, then how can we assess it?
• Another events/contexts/methods.
