Political space in municipalities in fragmented system of local government

There are numerous notes about non-ideological nature of local politics. However, such notes are only scarcely supported by empirical analyses. In this paper we are examining political spaces in Czech municipalities before 2022 local elections. For the purpose of analysis, we utilize more than 1000 electoral manifestos from about 150 municipalities with their sizes ranging from 1000 to 400 000 inhabitants. We assume that with rising size and with raising proportion of parliamentary parties within local party system, the electoral system is more ideological and more similar to system on national level. Furthermore, we expect that structure of political space is affected by organization of local government leading to different structures in amalgamated and non-amalgamated municipalities, and between municipalities with and without extended administrative powers, because these factors provide further axes to shape political competition. Electoral manifestos will be processed by means of automatic coding (topic models and wordfish).