Individuální charakteristiky kandidátů ve volbách do zastupitelstev obcí a jejich vliv na volební výsledky

• Authors: Josef Bernard

Title variants

EN

The Personal Characteristics of Candidates in Municipal Elections and Their Effect on Election Results

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The article discusses the role of the personal characteristics of candidates in municipal elections as important factors infl uencing the candidates’ election success. Voters lacking suffi cient or relevant information about the candidates and their political preferences can use knowledge of the candidates’ personal characteristics as specifi c cues or shortcuts in their choice. On the other hand, the candidates’ personal characteristics are the private resources they can use to infl uence the chance to getting elected. The article uses a logistic regression to analyse the impact of candidates’ personal characteristics on their electoral success in Czech municipal elections. A list of all candidates in the elections was used, including information about their sociodemographic and political characteristics and their election results. First examined is how a candidate’s ranking on the list of candidates can depend on his or her personal characteristics. Second, how a candidate’s election success can depend on his or her position on the list of candidates and on his or her personal characteristics is analysed. The list of candidates for the 2010 elections was combined with lists of candidates for several previous elections in order to investigate the infl uence of incumbency. The results suggest that incumbency is the dominant independent factor explaining the election success of individual candidates, yet other characteristics, such as sex, education, age or membership in political parties are important as well. In small municipalities, the situation differs in some aspects from that in cities.

Keywords

EN

councillors; municipal elections; personal characteristics; Czech Republic; incumbency; voting behaviour; factors of election success municipalities

Discipline

• SOCIOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 613–640

Contributors

author

Josef Bernard

• Katedra sociologie, Filozofi cká fakulta Univerzity Hradec Králové, Rokitanského 62, 500 03 Hradec Králové, Czech Republic