What is the correct way to nest Schema.org Property Types inside an Object Type in JSON-LD - json

Question

Question:
How to nest a Schema.org property types inside an Object Type in a JSON-LD code?
Context:
I have a website with pages about the biography of persons. I have a validated JSON-LD code for the Schema.org Person Object Type.
I want to expand the code to include the persons that came before and after a person in a certain role. For example, if the page is about a mayor of a city, I want to add the previous and following mayors.
The closest properties I could find are follows for the previous mayor (link) and followee (link) for the following mayor.
The Problem:
The property follows was validated with no problems, but followee gave an error if placed directly under the Person type as it requires a FollowAction type.
The property #followee is not recognized by Google for an object of type Person.
Workaround Tried:
I tried to nest the code, but I could not do this successfully.
For example:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"#context": "http://schema.org/",
"#type": "Person",
"name": "john Citizen",
{
"#context": "http://schema.org/",
"#type": "FollowAction",
"followee": {
"#type": "Person",
"name": "Steve"
}
}
}
</script>
I tired several other variations, but all led to errors. Are there any feasible correction to the code, or alternative ways to achieve the goal?

Answer 1

As I mentioned in the comment, I don't think follows or FollowAction are appropriate for your use.
For academic purposes, there is a way to mark up FollowAction inside a person. As FollowAction can reference a Person via it's agent, but not the other way around, you can use the reverse property to indicate a kind of backward reference:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"#context": "http://schema.org/",
"#type": "Person",
"name": "john Citizen",
"#reverse": {
"agent":
{
"#type": "FollowAction",
"followee": {
"#type": "Person",
"name": "Steve"
}
}
}
}
</script>