florentine {ergm}

Florentine Family Marriage and Business Ties Data as a "network" object

Description

This is a data set of marriage and business ties among Renaissance Florentine families. The data is originally from Padgett (1994) via UCINET and stored as a network object.

Usage

data(florentine)

Details

Breiger & Pattison (1986), in their discussion of local role analysis, use a subset of data on the social relations among Renaissance Florentine families (person aggregates) collected by John Padgett from historical documents. The two relations are business ties (flobusiness - specifically, recorded financial ties such as loans, credits and joint partnerships) and marriage alliances (flomarriage).

As Breiger & Pattison point out, the original data are symmetrically coded. This is acceptable perhaps for marital ties, but is unfortunate for the financial ties (which are almost certainly directed). To remedy this, the financial ties can be recoded as directed relations using some external measure of power - for instance, a measure of wealth. Both graphs provide vertex information on (1) wealth each family's net wealth in 1427 (in thousands of lira); (2) priorates the number of priorates (seats on the civic council) held between 1282- 1344; and (3) totalties the total number of business or marriage ties in the total dataset of 116 families (see Breiger & Pattison (1986), p 239).

Substantively, the data include families who were locked in a struggle for political control of the city of Florence around 1430. Two factions were dominant in this struggle: one revolved around the infamous Medicis (9), the other around the powerful Strozzis (15).

Source

Padgett, John F. 1994. Marriage and Elite Structure in Renaissance Florence, 1282-1500. Paper delivered to the Social Science History Association.

References

Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994) Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.

Breiger R. and Pattison P. (1986). Cumulated social roles: The duality of persons and their algebras, Social Networks, 8, 215-256.

See Also

flo, network, plot.network, ergm