Robert Jan Mokken, born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1929. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Emeritus Professor of Quantitative Methods and Political Science at the University of Amsterdam.
Fellow (1 September 2000 – 30 June 2001)
My participation was in the nucleus “Network Analysis”. This group envisaged a comparative analysis of interlock networks between the top 250 industrial and financial corporations in four countries (Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S.A.), for the years 1976 and 1996. My input concerned mainly methodological and conceptual problems involved in the cross-national and cross-temporal analyses of such relatively large networks, thus returning to my previous NIAS subject of over a quarter century ago. Most work in the area of social networks is restricted to relatively small groups. In the last three years a new field of research has opened with the study of the largest social network imaginable (near a billion of points), the Internet. I studied and extracted recent results that showed self-organising stabilising mechanisms (‘cut-off’ Power Laws) suggesting new methods of dynamic network modelling, simulation, as well as network sampling of large networked populations. For the NIAS theme group I organised and chaired a joint workshop with Dutch and English specialists on modern network analysis (14 February, 2001). In addition to that I contributed with others a paper to a NIAS conference on “Corporate Governance” (23-25 April, 2001). Four (joint) papers and a chapter in an edited book are scheduled for publication.