Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

The project examines voting behaviour in elections to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. The main objective is to analyse patterns of voting behaviour, the causes and consequences of the varying and generally very low voter participation, and the impact of low participation on the party system and party representation. The research will rely on aggregated data containing the personal characteristics of candidates, social, demographic, and economic attributes of electoral districts as well as contextual political variables. The analysis of the 1996, 2006, and 2008 elections will also draw on data from sample surveys that contain information on voters’ actual voting behaviour. The research will utilize advanced statistical techniques to carry out multivariate analyses of the effects of individual- and context-level variables as well as their interactions on the likelihood of a candidate’s electoral success.