Two heads are better than one even within government bureaucracy: how does an inter-departmental network evolve?

Inter-departmental collaborative networks can contribute to creative ideas, spanning and crossing solid boundaries resulting from formal specialization and departmentalization. This study gives an opportunity to understand how inter-departmental collaborative networks can be formed and persisted. Even though ties among government departments appeared to be influenced by vertical functional coordination, building mechanisms of bonding and bridging nature of networks can still work within government bureaucracy like other networks. Thus this study explores how an inter-departmental collaborative network is formed and persisted, adopting the structural temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM). Findings show that bonding networks serve to elucidate the mechanisms through which actors maintain existing relationships, whereas bridging networks helps to explicate the processes that underlie the identification of new collaboration partners. It is suggested that bonding and bridging networks might seem contradictory at first glance but rather complementary.