How political ideology affects the communication of organizational relations: A social network approach

Abstract

Organizational political ideology has recently received research attention, as more organizations engage in political activities to influence public policy and political regulation. However, there lacks a focus on interorganizational relationships as part of an organization’s political agenda. This study investigates political ideology as a mechanism of interorganizational relationship-building through politically active organizations’ agenda-building efforts. The study measures organizational political ideology through political donations, and investigates how it affects organizational relationship-building through press releases. We adopt a social network approach to examine interorganizational relationships predicted by the political ideology of the organization and the CEO at both the nodal and structural levels. After a computational analysis of 174,118 press releases by top political organizational donors, the findings show that an organization’s political ideology affected the mentions it received (i.e., in-degree), whereas its CEO’s political ideology affected its mentions of other organizations (i.e., out-degree). Value homophily did not significantly influence interorganizational representational networks, but mutuality and transitivity affected distinct patterns of connections among politically active organizations.