ABSTRACT
Political participation depends heavily on the existence of social networks. Many recent works insist on the importance of personal relationships in the nature, duration, and orientation of activism in political parties and trade unions (Diani and McAdam 2003). Personal networks have played a crucial role in recent transformations of political involvement, where individualization, multi-engagement, and specialisation characterize the rise of a network culture (see Lance Bennett’s contribution in this volume), which is prominent in the youth political culture in the alter-global movement. In this paper we compare two different analyses of the articulation between on the one hand, social networks and cultural practices, and on the other hand, between social networks and political involvement. Our premise is that on a methodological level, political activities can be considered as a cultural practice and observed with the same descriptive tools. We raise this question in juxtaposing the results of two different research projects on which we have collaborated in recent years. One deals with cultural and leisure practices, and the other with political involvement; both use the methodology of personal networks to represent social relationships among small groups of young people.
