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This paper deals with the issue of participatory budgeting as one of the newer tools of political participation. Its aim is to characterise the current situation in the Slovak Republic at two levels of territorial self-administration (self-governing regions and municipalities). To reach defined aims, it monitors the existence of legislative settings at the national level, the existence of individual settings at the observed levels and subsequently the practical application of the participatory budgeting itself. Procedures associated with the study of documents are used in article; the obtained data are summarized, described and compared mutually. In addition to laws and regulations issued by self-government units, the source of data is also the regional and local self-government units' official websites. In the absence of one universal definition of the participatory budgeting rules at the national level, the findings have shown that there are relatively extensive conditions for implementing participatory budgeting with its specific settings defined by self-administrations. In Slovakia, participatory budgeting is only gradually introduced into the internal rules, which reflects a relatively small number of municipalities or self-governing regions, which ultimately use it effectively.

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This is an exploratory cross-case analysis of political communication strategies of selected youth political organizations on the social network Facebook. The main objectives of this paper are to capture the topics and frequency of posting of Youth Political Organization on Facebook. Secondary, the study aims to capture the analytical approach categories/objectives: themes and actors. It focuses on the 3-month period from December 2020 to February 2021. Relevant youth political organizations in Slovakia and the Czech Republic are compared with youth political organizations operating at the European level. The organizations either belong directly to the kin political party or have the status of a supporting organization. At the European level, they are also affiliated to a European political party or are a supporting organization of a European political party. The data source is the official profiles of youth political organizations on the social network Facebook. Data processing is based on content analysis of published posts. Content analysis focuses on topics, the frequency of topics, the occurrence of keywords in the overall set of posts, and identifying attitudes to topics. The obtained data are evaluated by descriptive statistics. The presentation of the data is supplemented by tables, including graphical processing using the Voyant Tools text analysis tool. Key findings indicate that COVID-19 pandemic is the most communicated topic both on national and European level. Czech and Slovak cases seek to gain support or create conflict based on selected topics, while European level forms an area of cooperation among organizations.

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