1. Online Social Capital in Political Contexts:
Does the ”Online” Make Any Difference
SNA Summer School 20131
Javier Sajuria
Department of Political Science Science
University College London
August 2013
1
Paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2224874
Slides: http://slidesha.re/17x6DeV

2. Research Question
How does online social capital differ from offline social capital?

3. What is Social Capital?
”Social networks that operate under norms of trust and
reciprocity, and able to mobilise resources and information. ”

4. Based on this definition, my doctoral
research attempts to cover three dimensions
of social capital:
• Networks operating under norms of trust and reciprocity
• Resources
• Outcomes

5. ”Social Capital Dichotomies”
• Individual vs. Collective
• Network structure (brokerage and closure)
• Offline and online → Internet as a research framework

6. Social Capital NetworkTheory
(Burt 2005)
• Closure: Tight groups → norms → trust
Operationalisation: average clustering coefficient
• Brokerage: bridges across structural holes → mobilise
resources across the network
Operationalisation: average network constraint index

7. Data and Methods
• Occupy Research Project Datasets
www.occupyresearch.net
• #OWS
• #OccupyWallStreet
• #OccupyOakland
• #OccupyBoston
• #OccupyLondon
• September/October 2011 to February 2012
• Twitter Streaming API (for a discussion on the representativeness
of the streaming API, check Morstatter et al. 2013)
• Social network analysis using gephi, R (igraph, rgexf)

8. Descriptive Statistics

9. Closure and Brokerage

10. Network Graphs
Visualizations using OpenOrd algorithm

11. Concluding thoughts
• Interplay between brokerage and closure seems consistent
with theory
• Closure is low → if there is social capital here, where is
trust created?
• Offline interactions → We can’t see where it is created
• Bonding and Bridging Social Capital
• Conceptual problem → there is no social capital here, just
interactions with no trust
• Utopian rhetoric
• Network performance → if social capital is related with
successful networks, then how can we assess it?
• Another events/contexts/methods.

12. Thanks!
@jsajuria
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/people/research-students/
javier-sajuria