Political Science and Political Economy Research Seminar
The Diffusion of Ideas
Caterina Chiopris (Harvard)
Tuesday 21 January 2025 14:00 - 15:30
Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events. Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.
Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.
Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.
About this event
The rise of knowledge and the flow of innovation have long been recognized as an important factor for economic development. How are new ideas created, and how do they diffuse? Specifically, how do spatial connections affect the generation and dissemination of ideas? Ex ante, we could expect a denser network to increase the number of novel ideas and augment their diffusion. In the context of 19th-century Germany, this paper exploits the expansion of the railroad network as a major shock to spatial connections and studies its effects on knowledge production. The original, large-scale datasets collected include the universe of bibliographic records, covering all fields of knowledge, and detailed railway statistics. To measure new ideas – both novel concepts and new combinations of existing ideas – the analysis exploits topology and machine learning methods. I show that the railroad network increased the creation of new ideas, but decreased their diffusion. This was a by-product of specialization: groups of scholars could focus on narrower topics and co-locate with similar professionals; they learnt more from similar groups, but became disconnected from dissimilar ones. These patterns paved the way for modern knowledge production, and had important consequences for state institutions, on top of scientific breakthroughs. Descriptively, public officials and legislators were trained with narrower but deeper expertise; the bureaucracy became more specialized, and legislation more exhaustive.
The Political Science and Political Economy (PSPE) research group at the LSE brings together faculty and PhD students who do quantitative and/or formal research on political institutions, political behaviour, public policy, and political economy.
The PSPE Research Seminar provides a venue for researchers (mostly from outside of the LSE) to present their work.
These seminars are held on Tuesdays in term time at 14.00-15.30, both ONLINE AND IN PERSON in room SAL 3.05, unless specified otherwise.
Seminar coordinators: Aliz Toth, Carl Muller Crepon and Nirvikar Jassal
Contact gov.comms@lse.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list and to recieve the zoom link.
For further information please contact Maddie Giles: gov.comms@lse.ac.uk.