Who hold the presidential offices? Comparison of two European regions

Many books and articles in political science summarize the composition of parliaments. They describe the age structure, education, or gender of members of assemblies. Nevertheless, research in the area of heads of states is very scarce. The aim of this paper will be to map and summarize the basic sociological characteristics of European directly elected presidents after 1989. The trend and differences between the two European regions will be analysed. For the research two research questions are defined: 1) What do basic development trends look like when it comes to age, education, previous political experience, and gender of European presidents in the period after 1989? 2) How do these sociological characteristics differ in the region of traditional Western European democracies and in the region of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe? The paper will be contained in several parts. In the first part will be summarized the existing knowledge in the area of mapping the sociological characteristics of politicians in political science research. After that, the methodology and a short history of the direct presidential election in Europe will be introduced. It will be followed by the analytical part of the paper where the age structure, education, previous political experience, and gender will be mapped. After that, the results will be described in view of trends during the research period and compared in two European regions – traditional Western democracies and post-communist Europe. In the conclusion, the results will be summarized.