Spatial Dimensions of Female Political Participation: Regional Perspective of Women’s Descriptive Representation in Czech Local Councils, 1994–2018

Abstract

This paper focusses on the analysis of female political participation in the decision-making processes at the local level. We analyse women’s descriptive representation in Czechia on a very detailed spatial structure and an extended yearly time series (1994–2018). The main goal of the paper is to examine the spatial dimension of the disparities in female representation in local elections at the level of all Czech municipalities. To achieve this goal, global and local spatial autocorrelation methods were used. The observed spatial patterns of women’s descriptive representation in Czech local councils proved to be very stable. Furthermore, an analysis of the spatio-temporal (in)stability of women’s representation across different elections demonstrated that despite the divergent spatial autocorrelation of women’s descriptive representation across Czechia’s territory, there were no substantial changes in the clustering of women’s representation between elections, except for an identified overall decline in the homogeneity of the clusters. This suggests the existence of considerable spatio-temporal stability of women’s representation between local elections in the different municipalities. Thus, women’s descriptive representation attained in a municipality in a specific election reproduces at a similar level in the following elections rather than diffusing to surrounding municipalities in the form of a contagion effect.