The devil in the details: Influence of group characteristics on voting behavior in the Slovak National Council as seen through multiplex social network analysis

(in English): Many non-political factors have significant influence on the many ways of decision-making in politics. Researchers like Masket (2008) found a significant relationship between seating arrangements in parliament and the decisions that the seated politicians take. More interesting, however, are findings by Tunkis (2016) or Škvrňák (2021) that show how social factors influence decisions made in political organizations. However, literature is not clear on the question of how sociodemographic factors like gender or ethnicity wield significantly influence political decision- making. These studies are few and far between and do not focus on countries in the CEE region, like Slovakia. Atop of that, literature on this topic does not use social network analysis, which provides several advatantages that this thesis considers as worth exploring. One of them is the concept of optimal graph partitioning, which finds natural groups of like-minded nodes in terms of their links. This is exploited in an interesting way in a paper by Arinik, Figueiredo & Labatut (2020), which aims to analyze the Euroepan Parliament by mapping them onto multiplex signed graphs, which introduce more complete mapping of social organizations that contain a mechanism of internal conflict. This thesis tries to apply the method..