Local Effects in Local and National Elections

This paper seeks to provide new insight to differences in voting behavior in local and national elections. We expect that electoral behavior in local elections will be more influenced by the local context in which voters make their decisions about what party they will choose than in national elections. In this paper, we analyze 2017 national elections and 2018 local elections in several cities of different size in South Moravia region in the Czech Republic. Multilevel regression modeling is used on data from exit-poll surveys. Results of the analysis reveal the explanatory potential of indicator on both individual and aggregate levels when it comes to electoral behavior. Our research focuses on how the environment affects voting behavior of individual voters. More precisely, the analyses show how the individual level factors influencing party selection in elections interact with factors widely used in electoral geography as indicators of Rokkan’s and Lipset’s “cleavage” theory (e.g. unemployment, number of entrepreneurs, relation center-periphery etc.) measured on the level of electoral percents. The set of individual-level factors covers political interest, knowledge, trust and efficacy, social class and sense of responsibility. This perspective allows us to eliminate some of the weaknesses of conclusions drawn from aggregate data. The selected cases, unlike any national sample, allow us to attribute the additional spatial information to relatively small and internally homogenous regions. Moreover, the given situation provides unique opportunity to observe differences between levels because local elections were held only 1 year after national elections in very similar conditions.