Networks in Political Science: Back to the Future David Lazer,Northeastern University and Harvard University

tors affected by lobbyists? Is the capacity of social movements to mobilize affected by the structure of societal networks? Powerful evidence in the literature answers each of these ques-tions in the affirmative. However, compared to other paradig-matic foci, political science has invested tiny amounts of capacity in the study of the relevance of networks to political phenomena. Far more attention has been paid to the psychol-ogy of howpeople process information individually as opposed to collectively, and to the role that institutions play in struc-turing politics as opposed to the relational undergirdings of politics. A review of the flagship journals in political science reveals a dearth of articles on networks. Few, if any, doctoral programs include courses for which the primary focus is network-related ideas, and even the notion of a relational dependence in data is rarely mentioned in discussions of the assumptions embedded in the statistical methods that domi-nate political science. This gap is arguably the result of the boundaries among social sciencedisciplines thatemerged inthe1950s,whensocial networkideasfoundtheirhomelargely insociologyandanthro-pology while political science leaned toward statistical meth-ods that assumed away interdependence among observations. Ironically, there is now awave of interest in networks in polit-ical science thathasoriginatedpartly in sociologyandpartly in thatmost distant of disciplines frompolitical science, physics. The objective of this article is to provide an intellectual history of the study of social networks and political networks in par-ticular, as well as the current trajectory of such work