may also explain individuals’ choices. A businessman with friends and co-workers from that class is more likely to vote for a Republican candidate than a blue-collar worker. The findings may be concluded in the following way: "they (voting decisions) are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation and vulnerable to indirect social influences”. Major criticisms of this model were developed on their data collection methods. Respondents were asked about the possible opinions of their three best friends and three closest co-workers. However, not the actual opinions of these individuals, rather respondents' perceptions of their opinions were collected. This is why some authors think that the Columbia Studies can not be regarded as a predecessor of social network analysis. Contextual analysis The main claim of the literature on contextual analysis is that individuals live in a social environment that should be taken into account when one analyzes their political orientations. The particular social or political context (which may be institutional, occupational or residential for instance) someone lives in shapes his/her interpersonal interactions and thus his/her political behavior. Coming back to the previous example blue-collar workers are more likely to support a Republican candidate if they live in a neighborhood where most of the residents are white-collar workers than those blue-collars workers who live in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of blue-collar worker residents. One may see that the logic of this approach is very close to that of the Columbia Studies but is more focused on communities and contains a lower explicit emphasis on interpersonal networks. Interpersonal dynamics The third approach focuses on interpersonal interactions with the assumption that individuals are members of networks in which political information spreads through communication. Information with higher quality spreading through the communication channels probably has a stronger effect on political choices. Empirical data on the relevance of networks in electoral choices Although there are several possible research designs to analyze networks in political context, the relevance of networks in shaping electoral choices has been approached in three main manners – all being observational research designs. Firstly, most of the authors follow the data gathering technique and research design of Columbia Studies. It means that the randomly chosen respondents within a limited area are asked about their closest friends/relatives/co-workers (sometimes also about the closeness of this particular relationships) and about their possible political orientations. One famous example was done by Laumann in 1973 in Detroit in which