In this paper we use concentration of electoral support for individual candidates and divergence between party and electorate preferences for candidates to test hypotheses about the party-electorate relationship. We test them using data from preferential voting in Slovak general elections between 1998 and 2010. Our results suggest that low concentration is associated with parties based on ideology and high concentration is associated with parties based on leadership. Age of the party fails to predict the concentration or the divergence. For coalitions, type of coalition matters in regard to divergence. Furthermore, we document that divergence increases with the size of the electoral support though this seems to be true only for larger parties.
