MULTIPLE NETWORKS AND MOBILIZATION IN THE PARIS COMMUNE, 1871

Although sociologists increasingly recognize the importance of networks in social movement mobilization, efforts to understand network factors have been hampered by the operationalization of network factors as individual-level variables. I argue that disaggregating relational data into individual-level counts of social ties obscures the crucial issues of network structure and multiplexity. I analyze data on insurgency in the Paris Commune of 1871 and show that organizational networks and pre-existing informal networks interacted in the mobilization process, even in the final moments of the insurrection. Network autocorrelation models reveal that enlistment patterns in the Paris National Guard created organizational linkages among residential areas that contributed to solidarity in the insurgent effort, but the efficacy of these linkages depended on the presence of informal social ties rooted in Parisian neighborhoods. Thus the role of network factors can only be understood by studying the joint influence of formal and informal social structures on the mobilization process.