‘European integration’ is often used as a catch-all label for studies related to the European ‘Project’ or is presented as something that does not require much further conceptual work. An article published in the Journal of Euroean Integration by DPP Visiting Professor Sara Svensson with Carl Nordlund at the CEU Department of Political Science and the CEU Center for Network Science takes the concept seriously and explores how the notion of European integration at the local level can be conceptualized and measured.
The article is based on a process-oriented inclusive understanding of integration and uses relational datasets that map both domestic and cross-border communication ties among political representatives in four Euroregions along the borders of Hungary–Slovakia and Sweden–Norway. It tests and find several flaws with traditional network-analytical metrics based on the frequency of such ties, and therefore proposes two novel metrics inspired by the blockmodelling tradition in network analysis: cross-border connectivity and integrational overfitting.
The article is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07036337.2014.968568#.VEaVM_ldV8E