Mapping the Territorial Distribution of Voter Turnout in Czech Local Elections (1994–2018)

Abstract

This article analyzes voter turnout in the Czech Republic on a very detailed spatial structure and an extended yearly time series (1994–2018). Its main goal is to examine the spatial dimension of the disparities in voter turnout in local elections at the level of all (more than 6,000) Czech municipalities. To achieve this goal, global and local spatial autocorrelation methods are used. Municipality-level cartographic presentations then provide spatial evidence of highly stable patterns of electoral participation in Czech municipalities. In the long term, there is no substantial inter-electoral change of the clustering of voter turnout in the different municipalities, except for an overall decline of the homogeneity of the clusters with low or high electoral turnout. In short, the article provides an understanding of electoral turnout in Czech local elections that other approaches have not achieved.