8.2 Methodological limitations
8.2.2 Limitations of the multiple correspondence analysis
There are four main limitations of the MCA. First, MCA is generally sensitive to outliers. If one respondent has answered completely different from all other respondents, it is likely to impact the whole analysis and how survey respondents are grouped. An unimportant outlier with a very decentered position can change the shape of the MCA output graph so much that interesting contrasts in the data are hidden. This limitation can be mediated by removing obvious outliers. The sensitivity to outliers can also be treated as an advantage, as it will be easy to detect if there are some respondents, which have answered very differently than others and can help point the researchers’ attention to important respondents. To mitigate the risk of the MCA being skewed due to outliers, some survey respondents have been removed, which have left several survey-questions unanswered. This might leave out important observations in the data, and therefore these respondents have been studied manually to be sure that no relevant information has been left out.
Second, it must be addressed as a limitation that an MCA analysis ‘forces’ actors away from each other and puts a large degree of importance to the differences and similarities of the survey responses. The MCA of solely the car manufacturers depicts the car manufacturers as very far apart in their political positions towards the legislation, but the MCA of all respondents shows a picture where the car manufacturers are somewhat aligned on their political positions in comparison to other actors, except a few of the car manufacturers. The MCA of the car manufacturers therefore serves as a reminder that the differences among the car manufacturers are not as vast when compared to other actors.
A third limitation is that MCA produces a model which can only explain part of the variation in the data and can therefore not provide the full picture of what the data is showing. The first MCA’s principal components could explain 35.96% of the total variation and the second MCA’s principal components could explain 60.25%
of the total variation. As the respondents of the survey are heterogenous, it is not surprising that the first two components could not explain 100% of the total variance. Rather, the components represent variables that are homogeneous across the entire sample, and with two principal components the MCAs can explain respectively 35.96% and 60.25% of the total variance. In the former, there are 67 respondents, and, in the latter, there are only 10 respondents. The former analysis therefore includes many different respondents and a large degree of heterogeneity, and therefore the total variance explained is lower. On the other hand, in the latter analysis, more variance is explained because there are fewer respondents and they are – expectedly – more homogenous than the group of 67 respondents, because they all share the characteristic of being car manufacturers.
Furthermore, the more variables included, the less variability each dimension will tend to explain. 40 variables were included in this thesis, which come from 10 carefully selected survey questions with four answer possibilities. This risk has been mitigated by carefully investigating all relevant dimensions to see if there were other salient features hidden in dimensions.
Last, MCA analysis treats all input variables equally and then shows the strongest relationships. This might be a problem if making an analysis on an entire survey, because some questions might be repeated or are less important. Therefore, a careful selection of relevant survey questions has been chosen for the analysis. The selection of questions might however also produce a potential weakness in the study, as it is subject to researcher bias and what questions are considered important according to the researcher. This weakness has been mitigated by cross-checking the important questions with what has been highlighted by other sources as the most important questions in the survey.
9 Conclusion
This thesis has investigated the extent to which social contagion can explain homogeneity in the political positions of a group of car manufacturing companies involved in the EU’s legislative proposal: “Setting CO2
emission performance standards for new passenger cars and for new light commercial vehicles, and repealing Regulations (EC) No 443/2009 and (EU) No 510/2011” (COM 676/2017). The thesis found no clear indications of social contagion in the political positions of the car manufacturing companies. Hence, results have not supported the contagion-argument that actors’ degree of homogeneity in political positions depend on their strength of relational ties.
The theory of social contagion focuses on how attitudes, beliefs and behavior can spread through actors in a social system. The concept is closely related to crowd behavior and the extent to which homogeneity occurs in social systems. The degree of homogeneity in the political positions of manufacturers will affect their capabilities of engaging in collaborative lobby activities. This indirectly affects their success as lobby actors since collaboration among actors are one of the main conditions for successful influence in policymaking. The theory of social contagion therefore inspired an expectation that the social network of the car manufacturing companies could explain homogeneity in their political positions on the legislative proposal. More specifically, actors with strong relational ties, and thereby a short network distance, were expected to develop homogenous political preferences.
The dataset of the thesis has been based on responses from an online survey issued by the European Commission to external stakeholders as a part of the development of the legislative proposal. 10 car manufacturing companies were identified as respondents of this survey, including; Volkswagen Group, BMW
Group, Honda Motor Company, Mazda Motors, Groupe Renault, Nissan Motor Company, Mitsubishi Motors, Suzuki Motor Corporation and Toyota Motor Corporation. The analyses of the thesis were three-fold. First, a social network analysis of the 10 car manufacturing companies was carried out. The social network analysis provided the means to extract network distances between the car manufacturers, which laid the foundation for determining the expected degree of homogeneity in their political positions. Second, a multiple correspondence analysis was conducted on (1) all respondents of the survey and (2) the 10 car manufacturers. The multiple correspondence analysis provided the means to extract distances in actors’ political positions on the legislative proposal. Lastly, the network distances between car manufacturers in the social network analysis and their political distances from the correspondence analysis were combined in a linear regression, to be able to conclude whether there was a correlation between the two distance-measures.
The social network analysis investigated the strength of relational ties between pairs of actors based on their network distances. Ties were defined through shared umbrella organization memberships, and the strength of a tie increased with the number of shared memberships. Strong ties were defined as actors having short distances, and weak ties were defined as actors having long distances. Results found a high degree of connectedness in the network of the car manufacturers due to overall strong ties between pairs of manufacturers, hence short network distances. Based on these findings, the network analysis concluded that the relational ties of manufacturers provided good conditions for homogeneity in political positions to occur.
Furthermore, the network analysis ranked pairs of manufactures based on their tie strength. The ranking concluded that pairs constituted by a mix of actors like BMW, Renault, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen and Skoda, expectedly would be very similar in political positions, whereas pairs constituted by a mix of actors like Mazda, Suzuki and Mitsubishi expectedly would more dissimilar in their political positions.
The correspondence analysis was divided into two sub-analyses. The first multiple correspondence analysis was conducted on all survey respondents in a sorted dataset and showed that responses from car manufacturing companies were generally distinguished from other survey respondents’, for example environmental groups or car component producers. The political positions of the car manufacturers showed that manufactures generally were against more regulation, but manufacturers Nissan, Renault, BMW and Mazda deviated from the rest. The second multiple correspondence analysis was conducted on solely the 10 car manufacturers and showed a more nuanced picture of the differences in the political positions of manufacturers. Toyota, Volkswagen, Skoda, Mitsubishi, Honda and Suzuki clustered together and therefore tended to have very small political distances between each other. BMW and Mazda had more deviant positions compared to the other manufacturers and therefore had rather large political distances to the rest of the actors. Nissan and Renault had the same political position, since their survey responses were completely similar. They also deviated a bit from the rest of the manufacturers. The correspondence analysis could therefore stress some degree of
homogeneity in the political positions of the group of car manufacturers compared to other respondents of the survey. However, it is also concluded that the political positions of the individual manufacturers tended to deviate from each other.
Combining the analytical findings in the social network analysis and correspondence analysis, the linear regression showed that there was no significant correlation between the distances in the two analyses.
Therefore, based on the results of the linear regression, social contagion cannot explain homogeneity in the political positions of car manufacturers involved in this specific proposal. Results were discussed against the theory of social contagion, finding that social contagion often occurs in situations of uncertainties. The thesis argued that the legislative proposal to reduce CO2 emissions in the automobile industry cannot directly be classified as an uncertain situation since reducing emissions has been on the EU’s political agenda for almost thirty years. Such finding could explain why results of social contagion were moderate. A further explanation for such moderate results could be that contagion effects have been found to be more present in longitudinal data, because actors often react to the behavior of their peers over time and that solely determining the political positions of actors based on a single survey might be too simplistic.
10 Suggestions for further research
Based on the discussion of the thesis, this section will summarize the following six key suggestions for further research. As this paper makes a methodological contribution to the literature, the recommendations especially focus on how the methodology could be improved for future research purposes.
1. Up-scaling the size of the study to include a larger sample of observations. The research design of this paper is limited by the low number of observations, and future research could scale up the research design and apply it to a much larger sample of observations. In particular, it would be interesting to see if the linear regression becomes significant, if a wider range of actors are included, such that there are smaller communities in the network analysis and not just one community of somewhat closely connected actors. Furthermore, including actors which do not have business motives might provide new insights, as business actors might be predetermined in their positions, because they are trying to protect their business models against negation.
2. Up-scaling the study to include several cases, either across issues or as several legislative proposals within the same issue area. The findings of this paper do not show evidence of contagion effects, but it has been argued that actors react to the behavior of their peers over time, when they have time to assess their behavior (Hadden & Jasny, 2017). This would however require a different dataset than the consultation survey, because it is a one-time conducted survey. Scaling up the study to include several
cases could provide insights into how some actors behave within a certain issue area or if there are differences to how actors act in different issue areas.
3. Comparing contagion and structural equivalence effects of the network. A further analysis could have developed a measure of structural equivalence in each actor-pair, which could have also been compared to the distances in political positions through a linear regression. This would provide a directly comparable framework to assess contagion against structural equivalence.
4. Utilizing the methodology presented in this thesis by using a different measure of what a tie constitutes. If ties are defined through personal connections, e.g. through meetings on personal-level or through LinkedIn connections, it could create a basis for a deeper analysis of structural equivalence effect on homogeneity in political positions. It would be interesting to conduct a one-mode network analysis of which ties were based on, for instance, participation in same meetings and then to investigate the contagion effects by setting it relative to MCA distances. Then, comparing the results with a two-mode network analysis of actors and umbrella memberships to be able to distinguish between contagion and adaptation mechanism and investigate whether one of them is stronger.
5. Combining a social network analysis with specific measures of performance to test the capitalization mechanism. When we compare the findings of the social network analysis with a performance measure such as amount of sold zero- and low emissions vehicles, there are indications of a connection. Further research could include a wide range of performance related measures in an MCA and make a similar research design, which compares distances in social network with distances on the factor map.
6. Combining the research design of this paper with qualitative interviews with selected key personnel.
Conducting interviews with relevant officers could provide insights into the consciousness of the actions taken related to political positions. If a future study could prove contagion effects using the framework of this thesis, interviews could also provide valuable insights and triangulation as to whether the results are reliable.
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