Hâncean Marian-Gabriel, Perc Matjaž, Gheorghiță Adrian, Vega Yon George G, Mihăilă Bianca-Elena
Department of Sociology, University of Bucharest, 90-92 Panduri St., Bucharest 050663, Romania.
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Jan 26;9(1):211609. doi: 10.1098/rsos.211609. eCollection 2022 Jan.
Dialogues among politicians provide a window into political landscapes and relations among parties and nations. Existing research has focused on the outcomes of such dialogues and on the structure of social networks on which they take place. Little is known, however, about how political discussion networks form and which are the main driving forces behind their formation. We study a collection of ego-networks from 30 randomly sampled Romanian politicians to reveal fundamental processes behind the formation of political discussion networks. We show that ties in such networks tend to be strong and balanced, and that their organization is not affected by sex, age or education homophily. We use the exponential family of random graph models for small networks to assess likely closure mechanisms and possible homophily effects, but we note that further research and additional data are needed to fully understand the impact of context and political affiliations on the generalization of our findings.
政治家之间的对话为洞察政治格局以及政党和国家之间的关系提供了一个窗口。现有研究主要关注此类对话的结果以及对话所发生的社会网络结构。然而，对于政治讨论网络是如何形成的以及其形成背后的主要驱动力是什么，我们却知之甚少。我们研究了从30名随机抽取的罗马尼亚政治家那里收集到的自我网络，以揭示政治讨论网络形成背后的基本过程。我们发现，此类网络中的联系往往紧密且平衡，而且其结构不受性别、年龄或教育同质性的影响。我们使用适用于小网络的随机图模型的指数族来评估可能的封闭机制和潜在的同质性效应，但我们也指出，需要进一步的研究和更多的数据，才能全面理解背景和政治派别对我们研究结果普遍性的影响。
