Abstrakt
In June of 2013, the Czech Republic was shaken by a political corruption scandal of previously unseen proportions and consequences. It involved the prime minister, deputies, military espionage agents, high officials as well as criminal entrepreneurs and led to a fall of the government.
My research dealt with exploratory analysis of network of actors investigated in this case. Using secondary data, first I analyzed cohesion, centralization, centrality measures and cliques in the network.
Then I used conventional blockmodeling to search for roles and positions within the network. My results suggest that the network is dense and centralized with overlapping cliques contrary to other covert networks possibly accounting for its eventual disruption by police.
Positional analysis using different methods such as CONCOR or different types of cluster analysis revealed a structure resembling the core-periphery model, which is then supported by measuring coreness. In the end, I discuss potential improvement of corruption and covert networks research in general with the use of multiplex networks.