Dear SSJ Forum members,

Len Schoppa's comments distinguishing ideas from ideology parallels the sociological distinction between technical knowledge (or belief) and deeper value-laden interpretive schema that actors carry with them. Both these are in the purely symbolic, cognitive and emotive realm, as opposed to extrinsic motivators which are based on the exchange of immediate material consequences.
If we wish to distinguish the effects of these in policy networks, in order to unravel the causal forces at work, one new approach is through the measurement of multiplex networks -- different types of networks among consequential actors.
Tsujinaka and I measured these in Japan for the labor policy domain in 1988-90, as part of the larger comparative project with Germany and the US. We have the trust, work, political support and communication networks among the 122 most important actors for the Japanese labor domain, obtained through face-to-face interview survey. The 3 nation study compares the predictive capacity of centrality in communication and political support networks for the three nations. The communication network (confirmed by two actors for each tie) indicates the flow of information, which is a proxy for "ideas" and the building of mutual ideologies, as defined above. Political support, on the other hand, is more a proxy for indicating common material interests.

Which do you think would be more predictive of an organization's influence (as perceived and voted on by the 122 politically-astute organizational respondents) for Japan, centrality in communication or in political support?

We thought communication would be more important in Japan than in the US or Germany. But contrary to our hypothesis, the reverse turned out to be true.
Political support centrality was more predictive of percieved influence in Japan, while communication centrality was more predictive in the US and Germany.
This indicates the degree to which "money talks" in Japanese politics, even more so than in the US and Germany.

Refinements of this method will provide more sophisticated ways of getting at these questions. At the APSA in Chicago, on Saturday at the Japan Forum thing with Lee Farnsworth, I will be giving a paper (my first at the APSA) in which I try to operationalize the dominant Japan political- economy theories (MITI centric, LDP principle centric, network state, no center, etc.) models in terms of relative organizational centrality/peripherality of MITI, LDP etc in the four networks we have measured. This is one way to test the systemic validity and accuracy of their tenets. If you are interested in this effort, I would be happy to send you a copy of the paper early. I am looking forward to and most interested in hearing political scientists' comments on what political sociology and social networks bring to this debate.