Empirical analysis of the Portuguese governments social network

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.