Perception of Slovenian Political Parties: A Network Approach

Matej Kovačič, Valentina Hlebec, and Samo Kropivnik

Abstract

The first democratic multi-party parliamentary elections in Slovenia in 1990 also began the process of building relations between political parties. A useful approach to studying this process is the method of social network analysis, as shown by Kropivnik and Mrvar (1996), who used this approach to examine similarities and dissimilarities between parliamentary political parties on an eleven-point scale. Members of the Slovenian parliament were asked to fill in a rather extensive questionnaire about their perceptions of Slovenian political space. Based on these responses, the authors were able to present a clear picture of the network of Slovenian parliamentary parties and its significant characteristics. In this study, we have pursued the same objective by utilising voters’ perceptions of relations between parties. Clearly, parliament members cannot be interviewed at any time and too many times. Voters are much more convenient respondents for such studies focusing on the process of change. On the other hand, voters are not involved in politics as much as elected parliament members and they cannot have the same concern and expertise as insiders. Therefore, the randomly chosen respondents were asked to estimate relations between parties on a less demanding seven-point scale, using a two-stage approach. To avoid response bias, a split-half approach was used to assess original and reverse relations (party A against party B and vice versa). Furthermore, each respondent was asked to evaluate only five of all fifteen possible relations. In this article, the main objective is to show that a random sample of voters and telephone interviewing can be used to evaluate political space if the described data collection design is followed. In addition, an up-to-date picture of the network of Slovenian parliamentary parties is presented.