Spatial Dimensions of Electoral Participation: Regional Perspective of Voter Turnout in Czech Local Elections, 1994–2018

Electoral participation is one of the basic indicators of the quality of democracy and similarly, political participation (i.e., the active involvement of citizens in the political process) is a necessary (one of the basic) conditions for the successful functioning of democracy. Low turnout (as one of the main [though not the only] components of political participation) is then considered as one of the symptoms of the crisis of democracy or citizens' dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy, because one of the basic normative preconditions of democracy is, that every citizen of a democratic community should have equal influence on political decision-making and a higher level of electoral participation makes government activities more responsive to larger sectors of the population. However, most studies focused on electoral turnout have devoted to understand voting behaviour at the national level. This paper seeks to close this gap by zooming into the sub-national layer. More specifically, this paper focuses on the analysis of voter turnout in the decision-making processes at local level in the Czech Republic. We analyse data on voter turnout in Czech local elections in an extended time series between 1994 and 2018 (i.e., seven local elections). We use municipal data, i.e., for all 6249 Czech municipalities, as former analyses of social-spatial differentiation or electoral behaviour emphasized the need to work at the lowest scale possible, since analysis at higher levels of aggregation (regions, districts etc.) may obscure substantial intra-reginal differences, whereas similar spatial disparities can be expected in the case of voter turnout as well. The main goal of the paper is to examine the spatial dimension of the disparities in voter turnout in local elections at the level of all Czech municipalities. We use several spatial techniques to study spatial effects and analyse the dynamics of voter turnout in Czech municipalities. First, our exploration of the spatial structure of voter turnout begins with the formal detection of spatial autocorrelation using Moran’s I statistic. However, Moran’s I is an overall measure of linear association, whose single value is valid for the entire study area. Since the aim of this paper is to identify potentially different patterns of electoral participation in local politics within larger units and their transformation between elections, a local indicator of spatial association (LISA) is used to obtain a more detailed insight into the ways voter turnout is clustered throughout Czechia’s territory. Finally, we use spatial regression to identify the main determinants of voter turnout at local level compared to national level.