In his paper, “Social Networks, Civil Society, and the Prospects for Consolidating Russia’s Democratic Transition” (2001), James Gibson uses the concept of social networks to explain how strong and weak ties between individuals can facilitate the democratization process in Russia.

The literature on civil society suggests that democracy requires high levels of public association between individuals outside of government and the family. High levels of public association are though of as good for democracy because they facilitate discourse and get people involved in governing themselves on a smaller scale. Gibson’s paper moves away from the convention of looking at associations and instead looks at social networks. His rational is that under a totalitarian state like the former Soviet Union, formal organization were systematically discouraged and suppressed for fear that they may challenge state authority. Graphically, state policy was aimed at severing the edges connecting nodes. This policy succeeded in ended formal organizations but it created an extensive informal social network. The networks in Russia had to be extensive because the population did not trust the state’s media so they turned to their friends and neighbors for any news and information which was passed by word of mouth. The more edges that could be formed between different nodes, the more exposure each node received to information.

The democratizing potential of this network comes in two forms. Gibson proposes that the extensive social network could act as a foundation for the formal organizations which encourage a democratic ethos. More importantly, in a social environment where democracy is still foreign, communities rely on the individuals who are embedded in the network for: the dispersal of new information; the promotion of democratic values; and for familiarity with the new processes. Gibson’s article is a great way of seeing how you can apply the concepts of social networks and the structure of social networks to political science.

In class we learned that a network can be composed of both “strong” and “weak” ties. Gibson argues that “strong” ties are harmful to civil society because individuals connected by “strong” ties tend to have high levels of cooperation with in the group but do not engage with groups outside of their network. “Weak” ties have the strongest impact on civil society because they foster communication between different groups encouraging cooperation on a much greater scale. Gibson fails to mention the strong triadic closure property we learned about in class, which states that if an individual is connected to any two friends by a strong tie, then there must exist at least a weak tie between his friends. The strong triadic closure property would help to better explain how the Russia’s social network expanded over time. This raises the question, while strong triadic closure can be met by a “weak” tie, there always exists a possibility that strong triadic closure will result in the formation of “strong” ties. If so, would a network consisting of strong ties be harmful to Gibson’s theory of democratization via social networks? We may also ask, what happens to Gibson’s model when we add the concept of network stability?