Recent publications
Link Fraction Mixed Membership Reveals Community Diversity in Aggregated Social Networks
Community detection is a critical tool for understanding the mesoscopic structure of large-scale networks. However, when applied to aggregated or coarse-grained social networks, disjoint community partitions cannot capture the diverse composition of community memberships within aggregated nodes. While existing mixed membership methods alleviate this issue, they may detected communities that are highly sensitive to the...
Fragmentation of a longitudinal population-scale social network: Decreasing network closure in the Netherlands
Population-level dynamics of social cohesion and its underlying mechanisms remain difficult to study. In this paper, we propose a network approach to measure the evolution of social cohesion at the population scale and identify mechanisms driving the change. We use twelve annual snapshots (2010-2021) of a population-scale social network from the Netherlands linking all residents...
Fragmentation of a longitudinal population-scale social network: Decreasing structural social cohesion in the Netherlands
Population-level dynamics of social cohesion and its underlying mechanisms remain difficult to study. In this paper, we propose a network approach to measure the evolution of social cohesion at the population scale and identify mechanisms driving the change. We use twelve annual snapshots (2010-2021) of a population-scale social network from the Netherlands linking all residents...
Connectivity and community structure of online and register-based social networks
The dominance of online social media data as a source for large-scale social network studies has recently been challenged by networks constructed from state-curated register data. In this paper focused on the cross-comparison of the network structures, we investigate the similarities and differences of the Dutch online social network (OSN) Hyves and a register-based social...
China's rise as global scientific powerhouse: A trajectory of international collaboration and specialization in high-impact research
The recent and rapid ascent of China into today's scientific powerhouse is increasingly debated in circles of economic politics and policy making. Yet, we still know relatively little how such rise has materialized in terms of Chinese scientists' openness to international collaborations and relative focus on high-impact research, particularly in relation to the U.S. Leveraging...
Can social capital remedy structural inequality? Economic mobility in a longitudinal population-scale social network
The promise of equal opportunity is a cornerstone of modern societies, yet upward economic mobility remains out of reach for many. Using a decade of population-scale social network data from the Netherlands, covering over a billion family, school, workplace, and neighborhood ties, we examine how structural inequality and social capital jointly shape economic trajectories. Parental...
Freshness, persistence and success of scientific teams
Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study the success of persistent teams. Challenging the idea that persistence alone drives success, we find that team freshness - new collaborations built...
From contact to threat: a social network perspective on perceptions of immigration
Our perceptions are shaped by the social networks we are embedded in. Despite the acknowledged influence of close contacts on how we perceive the world, the role of the broader social environment remains opaque. Here, we leverage a unique combination of population-scale social network and survey data on perceptions of immigration. We find that both...
Socio-economic segregation in a population-scale social network
We propose a social network-aware approach to study socio-economic segregation. The key question that we address is whether patterns of segregation are more pronounced in social networks than in the common spatial neighborhood-focused manifestations of segregation. We, therefore, conduct a population-scale social network analysis to study socio-economic segregation at a comprehensive and highly granular social...
Contacts in contexts: Measuring intergroup contact opportunities at the population-scale through linked administrative and survey data
The notion of “social opportunity structure”(SOS) is central in research on segregation and intergroup relations, but notoriously difficult to measure because it requires capturing potential rather than actual contacts across multiple social contexts at once. We propose a new comprehensive approach to measure the notion of SOS for a whole country. We leverage population-scale social...
Contacts in contexts: a population-scale social network approach to the study of close intergroup social ties
The anatomy of a population-scale social network
Large-scale human social network structure is typically inferred from digital trace samples of online social media platforms or mobile communication data. Instead, here we investigate the social network structure of a complete population, where people are connected by high-quality links sourced from administrative registers of family, household, work, school, and next-door neighbors. We examine this...
The new gatekeepers of financial claims: States, passive markets, and the growing power of index providers
Since the financial crisis there has been a massive shift from actively managed funds to passive funds that merely replicate financial indexes. Instead of active investors influencing states through their investment decisions, in this new economic reality the locus of agency is shifting from investors towards index providers as they decide which companies and countries...
Proximity at a distance: The relationship between foreign subsidiary co-location and MNC headquarters board interlock formation
Corporations seek various relationships, such as board interlocks, with other firms to reduce resource dependencies. The consistent theoretical expectation and empirical finding that physical proximity is an important driver for board interlock formation is seemingly at odds with the emerging and growing literature on transnational board interlock ties. We argue that the effect of proximity...
403 Corporate Networks
What is the role of (corporate) networks in International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship? Throughout its young history, the field has developed different conceptual and empirical approaches to answer this question. At the same time, corporate networks are still underappreciated as fora for political and economic change. This chapter argues that such underappreciation can be remedied...
Community membership consistency applied to corporate board interlock networks
Community detection is a well-established method for studying the meso-scale structure of social networks. Applying a community detection algorithm results in a division of a network into communities that is often used to inspect and reason about community membership of specific nodes. This micro-level interpretation step of community structure is a crucial step in typical...
Mandate Ownership: power concentration and second-order agency conflict in the age of passive asset management.
The rise of passive investing is leading to a new reality of horizontal ownership in combination with a reconcentration of corporate control, notably at the Big Three passive asset managers BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. We introduce the concept of mandate ownership and point to a process of double decoupling in which the Big Three...
Beaten paths towards the transnational corporate elite
The transnationalization of economic activities has fundamentally altered the world. One of the consequences that has intrigued scholars is the formation of a transnational corporate elite. While the literature tends to focus on the topology of the transnational board interlock network, little is known about its driving mechanisms. This article asks the question: what are...
Netwerkanalyse biedt nieuwe inzichten voor clustergericht energiebeleid
Synergievoordelen binnen industriële clusters zijn een belangrijk uitgangspunt in het Nederlandse klimaatbeleid. Tegelijkertijd zijn deze clusters in de praktijk soms moeilijk waarneembaar. Een netwerkanalyse maakt een clustergericht industriebeleid met focus op verduurzaming mogelijk.
Evolution of the World Stage of Global Science from a Scientific City Network Perspective
This paper investigates the stability and evolution of the world stage of global science at the city level by analyzing changes in co-authorship network centrality rankings over time. Driven by the problem that there exists no consensus in the literature on how the spatial unit “city” should be defined, we first propose a new approach...