Shaping influence in governance networks: The role of motivations and information exchange

In governance networks, some actors might have more influence than others in the group's collective decision-making. This paper investigates whether an actor's prosocial and/or self-interested motivations to participate in a governance network help predict its level of influence in the group. We argue that information exchange is an important mediator in this relationship because an actor's tendency to actively diffuse information will depend on its motivations; while other participants being exposed to information from an actor are likely to increase the actor's influence on them. Using a unique relational dataset from 10 anti-corruption multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) in Latin America, Africa and Eurasia, we find that self-interested actors, rather than prosocially motivated ones, take the lead in information-exchange activities. The data also shows how this central role in turn increases perceived influence of self-interested actors among other participants, conditioning potentially the direction of agreed-upon collective objectives.