The strength of strong ties: A model of contact-making in policy networks with evidence from US health politics

Interest groups establish contacts with each other as a way of gaining useful policy information, and in this article we develop and test a model to explain this political phenomenon. Our simulation model suggests that when few need information, groups will pursue an acquaintance strategy by investing time and resources in gaining `weak tie' political acquaintances rather than in gaining `strong tie' political friends, but that as the collective demand for information rises, groups increasingly follow a chum strategy, placing greater emphasis on establishing strong ties. We test these hypotheses in an analysis of inter-organizational contact-making in U.S. health politics, using the data of Laumann and Knoke (1987), with OLS regressions of average group contacts over lobbying events over time and maximum likelihood count models of contacts across interest groups. Both analyses show that as collective demand for information increases, interest groups place greater priority on establishing strong ties, even while controlling for organizational attributes such as budget, mobilization capacity and organization age. The results suggest some conditions where policy networks in the aggregate are less likely to distribute information efficiently, and, in particular, that policy networks are less efficient at distributing information when information is most in demand.