Organizations, State Interactions, and Field Stability: A Network Analysis of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements

1 School of Sociology and the Applied Network Research Laboratory, National Research University­Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation {blind,gnmkrtchyan}@hse.ru 2 Department of Sociology and Criminology, Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri, United State [email protected] Abstract. Despite widespread scholarly attention on social movement media coverage, the full range of organizations appearing in the media with movements remains underexamined. To analyze this organizational complexity, we draw upon field theory, relating it to concepts from social network analysis. We hypothesize that interactions with state­embedded actors increase field stability, yet this effect decreases with the field's level of abstraction. We contrast a pair of US movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, according to their interactions with state­embedded actors. Through the New York Times's API, we collect and produce article co­appearance networks that approximate the population of Times’s indexed organizations. We parse fields from these networks using community detection algorithms. Our analyses test stability using triadic closure propensities and average coreness. Our findings show that subgroups affiliated with the Tea Party had greater stability than those of Occupy Wall Street.