The RC38 (Politics and Business) board meets regularly online—and we are now opening these meetings to anyone interested in presenting an early draft, research project, or other work in progress.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, 6 May, 16:20 CET), we will host our first presentation:
“A methodological approach to designing interest group networks: Interest Group Population Design and Boundary Stability Analysis.”

Kinga Wieczorek will introduce the framework she has developed for designing interest group networks.

Abstract
The article addresses the challenge of defining network boundaries in interest group research, focusing on two key questions: how to design the population of actors and how to assess whether results depend on the chosen boundary criteria.

It proposes a methodological framework combining the Interest Group Network Design model and a Boundary Stability Analysis procedure. These tools enable researchers to systematically construct networks and evaluate the robustness of their findings, complementing approaches based on social network analysis (SNA) and bipartite networks.

Using a case study of organisations involved in a COP30 side event, the analysis shows that while boundary choices affect relationship strength and actor positions, the overall network structure remains relatively stable.

Join us here: https://lnkd.in/eFCu2tAN

Interested in presenting your research in future RC38 meetings? Feel free to get in touch—we would be delighted to hear from you. You can reach out through our LinkedIn page: IPSA RC 38.