Background
Relations between Slovene parliamentary political parties:
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SKD - Slovene Christian Democrats;
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ZLSD - Associated List of Social Democrats;
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SDSS - Social Democratic Party of Slovenia;
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LDS - Liberal Democratic Party;
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ZSESS - first of two Green Parties, separated after 1992
elections;
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ZS - second Green Party;
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DS - Democratic Party;
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SLS - Slovene People's Party;
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SNS - Slovene National Party;
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SPS SNS - a group of deputies, former members of SNS, separated after 1992 elections
were estimated by the members of the Slovene National Parliament. So the respondents were well informed and competent to give such estimations. In the questionnaire designed by a group of experts on Parliament activities, some questions about the political space and its dimensions were included and the following question about relations between parliamentary political parties:
If various criteria (or various dimensions of the political space) are taken into account, some parties are by average closer than others. How would you personally estimate distances between pairs of parties in the political space?
Please, estimate the distance between each pair of parties on the scale from -3 to +3, where:
-3 means that parties are very dissimilar;
-2 means that parties are quite dissimilar;
-1 means that parties are dissimilar;
0 means that parties are neither dissimilar nor similar (somewhere in between);
+1 means that parties are similar;
+2 means that parties are quite similar;
+3 means that parties are very similar.
To collect estimations each respondent was given a 10-party by 10-party table with empty cells in the upper triangle. The diagonal and the lower triangle were coloured in black. Each respondent had to estimate relations between 45 pairs of parties.
The measures of central tendency were computed on the basis of the estimations given by 72 out of 90 members of the Parliament. 17 members of the Parliament were not available at the time of interviewing and one refused respond. 64 respondents out of the 72 estimated all 45 requested party relations. Only two out of 8 respondents with missing values have a large number of missing values (namely 40), the rest of them have 5 to 10 missing values. As far as the parties (variables) are considered, there are from 0 to 8 missing values and a recognisable pattern: relations involving ZS (which had no representatives in the Parliament at the time of interviewing) include from 6 to 8 missing values, others from 0 to 3 missing values.
The weights of arcs in the network are averages of values multiplied by 100 and rounded. The missing values were excluded.