Community-Elite Influence Structures: Extension of a Network Approach

The conception of community leadership structure as a regularized pattern of communication and exchange of information pertinent to community affairs among members of a community elite, proposed by Laumann and Pappi (1973-1976), is extended in several related direcions. First, the network of regularized communication contact is related to issue-specific discussion patterns and to outcome preference and activation on specific issues. Our anlysis indicates that our measure of the routinized community-affairs discussion network is valid in that it represents a distillation of contact patterns that exist with regard to a variety of specific issues. Moreover, discussion contacts among the elite on routine, instrumental issues are found to be more closely reflected in the regularized network than are such contacts on unique, value-laden consummatory issues. We also find a moderated degree of "institutionalization" of contact patterns and support for an instrumentally orientad "bargaining" model of issue resolution in two American communities. Cross-community variations in bases of communication contact discussed in the latter part of the paper suggest that such a model may be associated with the use of business/professional ties in an influence structure, while an "oppositional" model may be characteristics of communities in which contact patterns are rooted in informal social relations.