How Do Networks Respond to Shocks?
Working Paper
Political networks are governed by behavioral rules — reciprocity, homophily, triadic closure — and our standard models treat those rules as fixed, even though crises visibly rearrange who talks to whom. So how do a network’s governing mechanisms actually respond when a shock hits, and for how long? This paper lets each mechanism move week by week in a state-space relational event model, then borrows the impulse-response logic macroeconomists use for economies to estimate, causally, how each mechanism reacts to identified external shocks. Applied to a decade of Twitter interactions among US–Turkey foreign-policy elites and dozens of coded bilateral crises, the answer is that crises briefly reorganize how elites connect: engagement across national lines rises, it flows through brokers rather than cold outreach, and everything settles back within about six weeks.