Attached ip_link.strace and ip_link_list.strace, the output of strace for the 'ip link' and 'ip link list' commands.
At the end of the process, both commands create an PF_NETLINK socket to receive from the kernel link information through the NETLINK_ROUTE group. The sendto() function fails with EACCES for 'ip link list' and its SELinux avc record relates to this event (the netlink prefix used throughout the documentation [1] is 'nlmsg' and the resource denied in the avc record is 'nlmsg_write'). The SELinux avc record for 'ip link' relates to a failed attempt to open "/data/misc/net/group" (it does not exist).
[1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/netlink.7.html