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Shifts in Voters' Preferences in 2016 in West Virginia
Obleserová, Natálie ; Szobi, Pavel (advisor) ; Pondělíček, Jiří (referee)
The theme of the thesis is the change of voters preferences and the impact of the shift of electoral support from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the state of West Virginia in the United States of America. The aim of the thesis is to find out what factors led West Virginia voters to change their voting behaviour in the 2016 election and why and based on what factors Donald Trump won. The thesis analyses what social and economic changes in the region had an impact on the victory. The thesis will first describe the political landscape of West Virginia, the cultural and socio-economic context of the electorate, and then it will focus on the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump, applied to West Virginia. The thesis is a case study and is divided into four parts. In the first part, the theory of electoral behavior and the theory of populism is briefly outlined, in the second part, the historical-cultural context of West Virginia, which is important for understanding the electoral mentality of voters, is presented. The third part will describe the historical-political context that serves to better understand party identification of voters and the election results in West Virginia. The last part applies the findings from the previous chapters to the election victory of Donald Trump in 2016.
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Analysis of the voting behaviour of the Hungarian minority in the 2023 Slovak parliamentary elections
Béber, Matúš ; Jelen, Libor (advisor) ; Madleňák, Tibor (referee)
The Hungarian political representation and its electoral base have undergone an intense internal evolution, split and value shift in recent years. Based on a study of the literature, the main motivation of this thesis was to clarify how this evolution has influenced the electoral behaviour of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia in the 2023 parliamentary elections. The main objectives of the thesis are to explain and describe the factors that influence the electoral support for Hungarian parties; to further clarify the relationship between voter turnout and the representation of the Hungarian minority; and finally, to explain the dependence of the electoral performance of Hungarian parties on the electoral performance of other political entities. The analytical part of the thesis is based on the results of the 2021 census and the results of the 2023 parliamentary elections. The main methodological procedure for answering the research questions is primarily the usage of the regression analysis. In addition to this, correlation analyses are also used. The results indicate a clear dominance of Hungarian parties in southern Slovakia. However, mainly due to low voter turnout Hungarian parties are not able to translate this dominance into parliamentary advancement. The most significant factor explaining...
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The effect of the "metropolitan voting" on voting behaviour in the 2021 Czech legislative election
Vratný, Radek ; Lepič, Martin (advisor) ; Mikešová, Renáta (referee)
This thesis examines one of the factors underlying voting behaviour in the last Czech legislative election to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in 2021. It explains the differences between composite and contextual research approaches and then focuses on the possible identification and demonstration of the metropolitan voting effect, which can be considered as a subcategory of the contagion effect. Given the lack of attention to this phenomenon in the literature to date, the paper summarizes and partially innovates the conceptualization of this phenomenon. The contagion effect, also called the neighbourhood effect, refers to a situation where people revise their voting behaviour under the direct or indirect influence of the prevailing stances and opinions of people moving or living in a defined area. Then they vote based on this revision, thus their individual characteristics, which are addressed by the composite approach, have less influence on them than would be expected. This paper attempts to demonstrate the effect of metropolitan voting in two metropolitan areas, Prague and Ostrava, using the statistical methods of multiple linear regression and spatial autocorrelation. Multiple regression works with many data at the level of municipalities and city districts...
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The Friends and Neighbours Effect and Its Relevance to Voting Behaviour in Czech Parliamentary Elections
Pileček, Radek
Voter decision-making about which political party to support in the elections is a very complex process. One of the key factors influencing our voting behaviour is the effect of particular candidates in terms of their local activities. Many Czech and also foreign studies show that candidates gain significantly higher preferences in the municipality of their residence and its surroundings. Within the analyzed parliamentary elections, this is reflected not only by the territorial concentration of preferential votes, but also by higher local electoral support of the political parties or movements represented by these candidates. This diploma thesis examines, among other things, differences in the strength of the described effect (technically called the friends and neighbours effect) between candidates from different political parties and in different regions of Czechia. Quantitative research has shown greater local strength and spatial extent of friends and neighbours effect for leading candidates from non-metropolitan areas who have experiences from local or regional politics, such as mayors or regional councilors. In the 2017 parliamentary elections, the friends and neighbours effect mostly influenced the spatial patterns of electoral support of the KDU-ČSL and the STAN movement and on the other...
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Specifics of electoral behaviour in East German states and their reasons
Šebek, Ondřej ; Handl, Vladimír (advisor) ; Šmidrkal, Václav (referee)
This thesis is aimed at voting behaviour and current voting trends in the eastern states of the FRG. During its short existence the right-extremist party Alternative für Deutschland has managed to succeed in regional as well as national policy, mainly due to the votes from the eastern states of the FRG. In my work I am dealing with specifics of the Germans choice during the elections to Bundestag, mainly I am focusing on the eastern states of the FRG. To clarify the reasons for the choice of Alternative für Deutschland in the east, I use the data obtained from the voters during the elections, on which I based the answers to my research questions. The conclusion of the thesis is that voters make decisions based on rational behaviour, as well as party identification, and populism also plays a role in decision-making, due to the promises of Alternative für Deutschland and their criticism of the government. Different results in the eastern states are affected by worse economic situation of the voters, inequality between eastern and western states of the FRG and immutable situation in the last 30 years since the unification of Germany.
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Information complexity of strategic voting
Palguta, Ján ; Turnovec, František (advisor) ; Doležel, Pavel (referee)
This thesis in political economy considers the concept of strategic optimisation of voting behaviour under imperfect information. Under strategic voting we understand an act of voting for other than voter s best preferred (order of) alternatives. Motivation for this thesis comes from the empirically witnessed fact that a substantial portion of the electorate votes for their second or third best preferred alternatives, seeing that their most preferred alternatives face in expectation low probabilities of voting success. At other instances, the voters vote strategically with the intentions of strengthening the coalitional partners to their best choices or to weaken the coalitional partners of the undesired parties. Despite to the evident individual rationality of the strategic voting, strategic voting is typically socially suboptimal. Strategic voting leads to social choices that do not reflect the truthful preferences of the public. Via a series of computation-based simulations the thesis studies the relative vulnerability of the most common voting procedures to strategic manipulation. The thesis categorizes these voting procedures by their degree of susceptibility to voting manipulation. By standard econometric techniques it confirms that strategic voting is most threatening in small groups,...
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The spatial analysis of the 2018 Czech presidential election results in the capital city of Prague
Vratný, Radek ; Lepič, Martin (advisor) ; Šimon, Martin (referee)
The 2018 Czech presidential election were profoundly controversial and polarising event. One of the polarising factors was a perception that the voting behaviour in the capital city of Prague is significantly different compared to the voting behaviour in the rest of Czechia. Therefore, the primary objective of this thesis is to examine the electoral support of both runoff voting candidates across the territory of the capital city of Prague. The main part of the analysis focuses on the spatial differentiation of the election results of both candidates at the level of Prague's polling districts and on searching for the spatial clusters of electoral support. For the purpose of the study the methods of the exploratory spatial data analysis were used, specifically the global and local statistics of spatial autocorrelation. Subsequently, the thesis attempts to clarify which factors determined the voting behaviour through testing the socio-economic and demographic indicators using the method of multinomial linear regression. The analysis proved that the spatial differentiation of the election results of both candidates is significant across the territory of Prague and detected the spatial clusters of electoral support. The analysis also clarified that this voting behaviour can be explained particularly by...
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The Green party in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony-Anhalt. Analysis of differences in voting behaviour
Myslíková, Adéla ; Handl, Vladimír (advisor) ; Šafařík, Petr (referee)
This bachelor thesis deals with the topic of voting behaviour towards the Green Party in Germany. The paper focuses specifically on the elections to the Landtag in 2016, in the two Länder Baden-Württemberg and Saxony-Anhalt. The Green Party achieved completely different results in these two elections, winning the elections in Baden-Württemberg and barely getting to the Landtag in Saxony-Anhalt. These two Länder serve as examples of the differences between the old and new Länder, which persist for almost 30 years after German reunification. The thesis tries to find answers to the questions of what specific differences in electoral behaviour towards the Green Party and its topics exist in the new and old Länder, what are the reasons and what are the consequences for German politics. The first theoretical part of the thesis presents the factors of voting behaviour, which are divided into long-term and short-term. In the second analytical part of the work, is this theory applied to a comparative case study of the two mentioned elections, which are compared on the basis of factors of voting behaviour. That means differences in the history and economic situation of Länder, the history of the Green Party and its typical voters. The party's election program, the competencies assigned to party by voters and...
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The Friends and Neighbours Effect and Its Relevance to Voting Behaviour in Czech Parliamentary Elections
Pileček, Radek ; Kostelecký, Tomáš (advisor) ; Daněk, Petr (referee)
Voter decision-making about which political party to support in the elections is a very complex process. One of the key factors influencing our voting behaviour is the effect of particular candidates in terms of their local activities. Many Czech and also foreign studies show that candidates gain significantly higher preferences in the municipality of their residence and its surroundings. Within the analyzed parliamentary elections, this is reflected not only by the territorial concentration of preferential votes, but also by higher local electoral support of the political parties or movements represented by these candidates. This diploma thesis examines, among other things, differences in the strength of the described effect (technically called the friends and neighbours effect) between candidates from different political parties and in different regions of Czechia. Quantitative research has shown greater local strength and spatial extent of friends and neighbours effect for leading candidates from non-metropolitan areas who have experiences from local or regional politics, such as mayors or regional councilors. In the 2017 parliamentary elections, the friends and neighbours effect mostly influenced the spatial patterns of electoral support of the KDU-ČSL and the STAN movement and on the other...
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Population Characteristics of Voters: Evidence from the Czech Parliamentary Election
Černý, Jakub ; Janský, Petr (advisor) ; Želinský, Tomáš (referee)
In 2017, nine political parties were elected into the Czech Parliament, which is the greatest number in the history of the country. This thesis analyses the voter turnout and results of particular parties, using aggregated data on the municipal level. The goal is to find a spectrum of variables that would un- cover connections between the population characteristics of voters and their decisions to vote and to choose a political party. The method of weighted least squares is used for estimation and the results are tested for the presence of spa- tial autocorrelation. Subsequently, a spatial error model is used for the same analysis in order to observe spatial effects in the voting results and provide a comparison between the methods. There is found a significant negative con- nection between the voter turnout and the share of people facing distraints, unemployment, and the share of people with no education. Concerning the election results, the parties ANO, SPD, and KSCM receive greater support in municipalities with greater unemployment and lower shares of businessmen and people with university education. On the other hand, the parties ODS, Pirati, and TOP 09 evince exactly the opposite trends in these explanatory variables. JEL Classification H70, I21, I30, J10, J11 Keywords voting behaviour, voter...
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