This paper elaborates a conceptual and analytical framework to study social dialogue articulation and its effectiveness in the EU. The framework derives from a multi-level governance perspective that seeks to account for the diversity of state and non-state actors involved at various levels of social dialogue. Effectiveness of social dialogue is conceptualized as the ability of social dialogue committees to deliver specific outcomes, while the effectiveness of social dialogue articulation in conceptualized as the ability to transpose social dialogue outcomes achieved at one level of social dialogue to another level of social dialogue and to implement EU-level social dialogue outcomes in nationally specific institutional and legislative conditions of diverse EU members states. The framework for analysis also includes three interrelated methodological suggestions for empirical study, including a quantitative survey among social partners, qualitative interviews for in-depth insights as well as network analysis in order to identify strong ties between involved actors that inform expectations on effective articulation of social dialogue between national and EU-level social dialogue structures.

With origins in post-war development thinking, the core-periphery concept has spread across the social and, increasingly, the natural sciences. Initially reflecting divergent socioeconomic properties of geographical regions, its relational connotations rapidly led to more topological interpretations. In today’s network science, the standard core-periphery model consists of a cohesive set of core actors and a peripheral set of internally disconnected actors.

Exploring the classical core-periphery literature, this paper finds conceptual support for the characteristic intra-categorical density differential. However, this literature also lends support to the notions of peripheral dependency and core dominance, power-relational aspects that existing approaches do not capture.

To capture such power-relations, this paper suggests extensions to the correlation-based core-periphery metric of Borgatti-Everett (2000). Capturing peripheral dependency and, optionally, core dominance, these extensions allow for either measuring the degree of such power-relational features in given core-periphery partitions, or as part of a criteria function to search for power-relational core-periphery structures.

Applied to the binary and valued citation data in Borgatti and Everett (2000), the proposed extensions seemingly capture dependency and dominance features of core-periphery structures. This is particularly evident when, circling back to to the original domains of the concept, examining the network of European commodity trade in 2010.

This article proposes a novel approach to blockmodeling of valued (one-mode) networks where the identification of (binary) block patterns in the valued relations differ from existing approaches. Rather than looking at the absolute values of relations, or examining valued ties on a per-actor basis (cf. Nordlund, 2007), the approach identifies prominent (binary) ties on the basis of deviations from expected values. By comparing the distribution of each actor's valued relations to its alters with the macro-level distributions of total in- and outdegrees, prominent (1) and non-prominent (0) ties are determined both on a per-actor-to-actor and a per-actor-from-actor basis. This allows for a direct interpretation of the underlying functional anatomy of a non-dichotomized valued network using the standard set of ideal blocks as found in generalized blockmodeling of binary networks.

In addition to its applicability for direct blockmodeling, the article also suggests a novel indirect measure of deviational structural equivalence on the basis of such deviations from expected values.

Exemplified with the note-sharing data in Žiberna (2007a), citations among social work journals (Baker, 1992), and total commodity trade among EU/EFTA countries as of 2010, both the direct and indirect approach produce results that are more sensitive to variations at the dyadic level than existing approaches. This is particularly evident in the case of the EU/EFTA trade network, where the indirect approach yields partitions and blockmodels in support of theories of regional trade, despite the significantly skewed valued degree distribution of the dataset.

The article explores how the notion of European integration at the local level can be conceptualized and measured. Based on a process-oriented inclusive understanding of integration and using relational datasets that maps both domestic and cross-border communication ties among political representatives in four Euroregions along the borders of Hungary–Slovakia and Sweden–Norway, we begin by applying and theoretically dissecting network-analytical metrics based on frequency of ties. Despite finding that such measures capture analytically relevant properties of political cross-border networks, we argue that they are less than ideal for capturing the notion of political integration. Instead, with inspiration from the blockmodeling tradition in network analysis, we propose two novel metrics—cross-border connectivity and integrational overfitting. These metrics not only enrich our understanding of political integration in cross-border settings but also can serve as useful mapping tools for policy-makers. A software client enabling the analysis of these measures supplements this article.

Borgatti and Everett's model (2000) remains the prevailing standard for identifying categorical core-periphery structures in empirical data. However, two issues have troubled this model since its inception. Firstly, there is the issue of formalizing the ideal core as a complete block or clique, which can be excessively stringent in practice. The second concern relates to the existing approach for capturing inter-categorical tie densities, which consistently penalizes solutions despite having perfectly matched densities. Building upon advancements in the direct blockmodeling literature, this paper extends Borgatti and Everett's model to address the identified shortages. To tackle the issue of inter-categorical densities, we replace the approach of correlating each cell value with the sought density with novel ideal blocks for exact and minimum densities. To address the constraint of a fully connected core, we introduce the p-core, a proportional adaptation of the k-core/k-plex solution, offering greater flexibility in defining the level of cohesion required for core membership. Through the application of these novel extensions to classic network examples, we showcase their utility in evaluating the core-peripheriness of empirical networks.