The power of Network Pluralism: multi-perspective modeling of heterogeneous legal document networks

Abstract Insights are relative—influenced by a range of factors such as assumptions, scopes, or methods that together define a research perspective . In normative and empirical fields alike, this insight has led to the conclusion that no single perspective can generate complete knowledge. As a response, epistemological pluralism mandates that researchers consider multiple perspectives simultaneously to obtain a holistic understanding of their phenomenon under study. Translating this mandate to network science, our work introduces Network Pluralism as a conceptual framework that leverages multi-perspectivity to yield more complete, meaningful, and robust results. We develop and demonstrate the benefits of this approach via a hands-on analysis of complex legal systems , constructing a network space from references across documents from different branches of government as well as including organizational hierarchy above and fine-grained structure below the document level. Leveraging the resulting heterogeneity in a multi-network analysis , we show how complementing perspectives can help contextualize otherwise high-level findings, how contrasting several networks derived from the same data enables researchers to learn by difference , and how relating metrics to perspectives may increase the transparency and robustness of network-analytical results. To analyze a space of networks as perspectives , researchers need to map dimensions of variation in a given domain to network-modeling decisions and network-metric parameters. While this remains a challenging and inherently interdisciplinary task, our work acts as a blueprint to facilitate the broader adoption of Network Pluralism in domain-driven network research.