Network structures and network effects across management and policy contexts: A systematic review

Abstract The wide application of networks in public administration has been driven by the practical need to address increasingly complex management and policy problems. To understand the outcomes of network structures, we reviewed empirical network research and examined the effects of six network structural properties across the five most studied policy domains. We found that certain structural properties such as global connectedness were consistently associated with positive network effects. Other structures such as brokerage/structural holes provided mixed findings, depending on the policy domain. Overall, our field is still in the early stages of developing research on network effects. The number of hypotheses on both node‐level and system‐level effects in any policy domain was relatively small. Most studies focused only on a single network at a single point in time, and thus very little work currently exists that examines the influence of contextual factors and their combined effects with network structures.