Thread by @NaimBroKhomasi

🚨Paper alert!🚨 #HistoricalSociology #SocialNetworkAnalysis

How do new groups assume positions of political power? Theories of conflict focus on between-group conflict; I propose a model where conflict starts within groups.

rdcu.be/cR96m

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In the spirit of Padgett & Ansell's "Rise of the Medici", I built the kinship relations among all ~1500 Chilean parliamentarians in 1828-1894.

This was a *very* cohesive elite, with more than 1000 parliamentarians falling into the network's giant component.

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The Chilean elites had a Russian-doll type structure, with a cohesive core surrounded by increasingly sparse layers.

The fig. below uses Moody & White's structural cohesion to identify layers of centrality, and annotates the 8 most representative families per layer.

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The network's core was formed by 165 persons and 8 families.

The families highlighted below had the same ancestral origin in the Basque-speaking village of Aranaz. Two centuries after arriving in Chile (in 1685), all four had made it into the country's oligarchic core.

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How did the oligarchy's clout in Congress evolve throughout the nineteenth century?

The graph below shows distinct drops in the 1850s and the 1880s.

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In their place entered the bourgeoisie, i.e., the rich but network-peripheral.

Graphs below: a) top-80 richest Chileans but network-peripheral; b) members of the (bourgeois) Nacional and Radical parties; c) freemasons; and d) English or German last names.

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We tend to think of elite renewal as the result of the struggle between old and emerging elites, like in @benwansell & @Samuels_DavidJ book below.

I show an alternative pattern, where conflict occurs within the old elites who then promote the new elites as a result.

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Here's how it works: oligarchic faction A enter into conflict with oligarchic faction B; as conflict escalates, they mobilise groups traditionally excluded from power. The winning faction promotes their non-elite supporters, thus changing the elite's social composition.

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I call this pattern "king-minister model", after Bourdieu's 1997 essay, "From the King’s House to the Reason of State".

Bourdieu explains the birth of bureaucratic states after the struggle between the king and siblings and the resulting rise of the minister.

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Why would the king fight his family and promote the minister, to whom he's unrelated?

The former have reasonable chances of threatening his power, while the latter less so.

e.g., Louis XIII exiling his brother and mother while upholding the authority of Richelieu.

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This logic applies in oligarchic contexts, during the early phases of democratization.

The most pressing threat of an incumbent oligarchy is often another, closely related oligarchic faction -- not a sociologically distinct group with visible contradictory interests.

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In 19th-century Chile, the four families of Aranaz mentioned above took opposite stances in three civil wars, despite belonging to the network's most cohesive core and having a common ancestral origin.

Every time they fought, new groups entered positions of power.

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More systematically, I find that in Chile's 1891 civil war, belonging to a common, highly cohesive area of the network did not increase the chances of fighting on the same side.

Graphs below: individuals (a) and families (b) coloured after their civil war allegiance.

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This is highly non-intuitive in the social network analysis literature, where structural holes are expected to structure competition.

Yet it makes sense from a king-minister approach: your most pressing threat is often closer to home than what you expected.

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I've recorded my daily schedule on Google Calendar for five years, so I have a pretty good estimate of how long writing papers takes me.

This one took me 627 hours, by far my most demanding paper so far.

Needless to say, it makes me very happy to see it out there :D.

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