Local and More Local: Impact of Size and Organization of Local Municipal Communities on Candidacy

Size of municipality is the traditionally tested variable explaining different kinds of political participation at the local level, the hypothesis about decline of participation with increase of municipality is mostly confirmed. There is also the additional intra-municipaity hypothesis, which adds the organizational structure of municipality into debate and suggests that mis-representation of some communities in the whole local parliament decrease the levels of political participation of municipality. However, there is lack in the reseach concerning the fact that differently defined communities can differently contribute to the overall rate in whole municipality. At the same time, there is just small number of research projects concerning the candidacy at local level. We want to focus on both of these gaps. Our paper concerns on relative number of candidates in the Czech Republic. Unit of our analysis is a unit of settlement, the smallest, historically determined unit, which defines the local community with shared identity. Units of settlement can be located in undivided municipalities (one municipality equals one unit) or in divided municipalities (one municipality is divided into two or more units). There are two types of units in divided municipality (central unit hosting office of local authority and peripheral units without office). The paper tests the hypotheses about influence of size of municipality, size of unit and relative proportion of unit on municipality on the relative number of candidates in the unit. We also work with the organizational type of unit and expect that the most disadvantaged communities (units in divided municipalities without office) produce smaller relative numbers of candidates than in undivided municipalities or central units in divided municipalities. We also suggest that the most advantaged are central units in divided municipalities, which shall produce more candidates than unidivided municipalities of equal size. We use data about candidates in almost all units in three local elections in the Czech Republic (2006-2014) and test our hypothesis using negative binomial regression.