Geography of the conservative-liberal cleavage and selected factors influencing the distribution of conservative and liberal voters in Slovakia

Abstract

The main aim of the paper is to identify the success rate in time and space of political parties with a more conservative electorate and those with a more liberal voters in Slovakia based on the results of parliamentary elections in the last twenty years and to conduct a subsequent correlation analysis of selected socioeconomic parameters (urbanisation rate, registered unemployment rate, the share of persons over 65 years of age, the share of persons with religious faith and share of university-educated persons) and the spatial distribution of conservative or liberal voters. We identify the success rate of parties with a more conservative or more liberal electorate at the level of the Slovak Republic as a whole, as well as in its regions and districts, in the parliamentary elections from 2002 onward, while also evaluating the issue through the spatially disaggregated results of the referendum on the family (2015). Based on statistical analysis, liberal vote rs in Slovakia are more notably concentrated in urban areas, particularly in districts with a lower level of unemployment, a higher share of people with a university education and non-religious residents. On the other hand, conservative voters are more evenly distributed throughout the country, and in their case, the highest statistical association identified among the monitored socioeconomic indicators related to the share of the population professing a certain religion. The highest summary statistical dependence among the examined variables in terms of the conservative-liberal conflict line was identified for indicators of the degree of urbanisation, the share of persons without religious confession and the share of university-educated people. It seems, given the current social situation opening up the liberal or secular ideas, that in the future the conflict of conservative and liberal values represented by specific parties and a significant number of voters in political struggle will become more significant, and not only in post-socialist countries. All the more important will be such studies, e.g. also in the context of setting up appropriate political marketing and effective election campaigns of political parties.