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Empirical analysis of the Portuguese governments social network

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Abstract

The Portuguese governmental network comprising all the 776 ministers and junior ministers who were part of the 19 governments between the year 1976 and 2013 is presented and analyzed. The data contain information on connections concerning business and other types of organizations and, to our knowledge, there is no such extensive research in previous literature. Upon the presentation of the data, a social network analysis considering the temporal dimension is performed at three levels of granularity: network-level, subnetwork-level (political groups) and node-level. A discussion based on the results is presented. We conclude that although it fits two of the four preconditions of a small-world model, the Portuguese governmental network is not a small-world network, although presenting an evolution pointing toward becoming one. Also, we use a resilience test to study the evolution of the robustness of the Portuguese governmental network, pinpointing the moment when a set of members became structurally important.

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Notes

  1. This research was carried out by Nuno Moniz and Adriano Campos.

  2. This was the year of the first constitutional government after the Carnation Revolution.

  3. Grupo Mello, Grupo Champalimaud, BES, BCP, Santander, Mota-Engil, PT, BPI, CGD, SONAE, Jerónimo Martins, Américo Amorim.

  4. The only individual which did not take part of those governments was António de Sousa Franco (PS).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, João Teixeira Lopes, Jorge Costa and Adriano Campos for their comments and reviews. Nuno Moniz gratefully acknowledges funding from FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) through a PhD Grant (SFRH/BD/90180/2012). Renato Soeiro gratefully acknowledges funding from FCT through a PhD Grant (SFRH/BD/88742/2012). Márcia Oliveira gratefully acknowledges funding from FCT through a PhD Grant (SFRH/BD/81339/2011). Nuno Moniz, Renato Soeiro and Márcia Oliveira acknowledge financial support by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project «POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961», and by National Funds through the FCT as part of project  UID/EEA/50014/2013. Francisco Louçã acknowledges financial support by FCT as part of the strategic project PEst-OE/EGE/UI0436/2014.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIAAD - INESC Tec, Oporto, Portugal

    Nuno Moniz, Márcia Oliveira & Renato Soeiro

  2. UECE, ISEG (Lisbon School of Economics and Management), Lisbon University, Lisbon, Portugal

    Francisco Louçã

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  1. Nuno Moniz
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  2. Francisco Louçã
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Correspondence to Nuno Moniz.

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Moniz, N., Louçã, F., Oliveira, M. et al. Empirical analysis of the Portuguese governments social network. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 6, 43 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-016-0348-7

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