Explaining the electoral success of the extreme right party ĽSNS in Slovakia 2010 - 2018: integration of Census data and electoral results
Description
The unit of datais the so-called micro-region. These units were created in 2005 as an alternative to the existing territorial division of Slovakia (Slavík, Kožuch, and Bačík 2005) as group of municipalities following natural borders, as well as the economic and social structure of the population. Together there are 160 micro-regions with an average population of just over 30,000 people. However, two of the regions, which include the two biggest cities in Slovakia, the capital Bratislava, and the city of Košice, are enormously populated when compared to the other units. For the sake of the research, we divided these two regions into smaller parts, which we broke down into districts. As such, we work with 169 micro-regions. Finally, we excluded micro-regions with at least 30 percent Hungarians. Thus, we end up with 136 territorial units. Based on theoretical considerations, we need variables that capture the presence and share of Roma minority, unemployment and education. As the basis for analysis, we use census data and official results of national elections provided by the Slovak Statistical Office. Due to specific conditions, the data about the Roma minority are gathered from the Atlas project . This unique project was undertaken in cooperation with several national and international bodies, and its results are based on thorough fieldwork, mapping all towns in Slovakia. It tallies not only the numbers of persons belonging to the Roma minority, but it also describes how Roma people are concentrated in a municipality. The remaining variables are based on census data. Unemployment rate is computed as the share of unemployed people among all economically active people. For the measure of education, we use a variable of the share of people with vocational education, because the proportion of people with basic education as the lowest possible level strongly correlates with unemployment. The amount of people with vocational education is calculated as the share of those with this level of education among all inhabitants older than fifteen years of age. Dependent variable of analysis is the support of LSNS in microregions computed from official electoral results of 2010, 2012 and 2016 elections.