The article focuses on the local aspect of electoral support for candidates to the Senate, the upper house of Parliament of the Czech Republic. Senate elections use a majority run-off system in single-member constituencies. First, the article describes the friends-and-neighbours effect, a process of electoral geography whereby voters prefer their own local candidate (i.e. a resident of the particular municipality or area) to opponents from geographically more distant localities. Second, the article examines the phenomenon of ‘local voting’ in elections to the Czech Senate. The analysis covers all electoral contests from 1996 to April 2011, including by-elections (except in the four largest cities by population owing to a methodological problem). The data file comprises a total of 1420 candidates and their election results at the municipal level aggregated to three geographically defined areas. It specifically examines differences in electoral support for a candidate in his/her home locality (municipality of residence), in a nearby neighbourhood up to 10 km away, and the rest of the constituency. Finally, the article focuses on the role of the home municipality’s size and monitors how local voting affects the level of voter turnout.
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The electoral behaviour is a subject to a vast scale of social, political, economic, psychological and geographical determinants ultimately influencing citizens during the elections. One option how to analyse this phenomenon is built up on the theory of social cleavages that inevitably affect the political relations within society. Therefore the election results are significantly differentiated depending on given space and temporal context. This article try to measure five socio-economic factors as ethnicity, religiosity, age, education and unemployment considering their influence on spatial pattern of electoral behaviour in given territorial units – at the state wide level of the Slovak Republic, but mainly its partial regions. For this reason, analytical instruments of spatial econometrics are applied, which pose the most appropriate tools to examine aggregate data duly regarding the geographical nexus of presented phenomena. The Spatial Durbin model is utilised for evaluating the linkage between socio-economic determinants of electoral behaviour and parliamentary elections' results held in Slovak Republic after 1998. In this paper we focus on the extent of repressor ś explanatory power forming the territorial picture of electoral outcomes in western part of the country and define the socio-political profile of regions, which are situated there.
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Within the period after 1989, we compare two societies with majority of the population residing in cities, which however applies more significantly to Czech Republic. Analyses of aggregated data from parliamentary elections confirm larger urban-rural cleavage than analyses based on survey research. Although both societies have a very similar profile of voter turnout regarding municipalities' population size, the difference in political preferences between countryside and cities is less prominent in Czech Republic than in Slovakia. Alternation of „urban“ and „rural“ coalition governments, which was occurring in Slovakia, was not observed in Czech Republic. Urban-rural political cleavage is significantly weaker in Czech Republic.
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