A Network-Based Approach to Elite Interview Sampling

Elite interview research remains central to political science inquiry, providing insights that other methodologies cannot achieve. The rich, contextual understanding gained through elite interviews has produced foundational contributions to our discipline. Political scientists are increasingly interested in eliciting insights on rather than just from elites as a politically relevant group, seeking to make broader inferences about elite behavior, attitudes, and preferences. This requires improvements to our existing methodological toolkit, which remains valuable but proves insufficient when researchers aim to draw conclusions about entire elite populations rather than collect information from them about political events and processes.