John Padgett - Florentine Families

Description

The John Padgett - Florentine Families Dataset

Background

Breiger & Pattison (1986), in their discussion
of local role analysis, use a subset of data on
the social relations among Renaissance Florentine
families (person aggregates) collected by John
Padgett from historical documents. The two
relations are business ties (PADGB - specifically,
recorded financial ties such as loans, credits and
joint partnerships) and marriage alliances (PADGM).

As Breiger & Pattison point out, the original data are symmetrically coded. This is acceptable perhaps for marital ties, but is unfortunate for the financial ties (which are almost certainly directed). To remedy this, the financial ties can be recoded as directed relations using some external measure of power - for instance, a measure of wealth. PADGW provides information on (1) each family's net wealth in 1427 (in thousands of lira); (2) the number of priorates (seats on the civic council) held between 1282- 1344; and (3) the total number of business or marriage ties in the total dataset of 116 families (see Breiger & Pattison (1986), p 239).

Substantively, the data include families who were locked in a struggle for political control of the city of Florence in around 1430. Two factions were dominant in this struggle: one revolved around the infamous Medicis (9), the other around the powerful Strozzis (15).

References

• Breiger R. and Pattison P. (1986). Cumulated social roles: The duality of persons and their algebras. Social Networks, 8, 215-256.
• Kent D. (1978). The rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426-1434. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

History

Data originally made publicly available in UCINET.