The regional dimension of the socio-political urban-rural conflict in Slovakia

Abstract

Political behaviour of citizens is traditionally formed by a wide range of factors that influence their voting decision in the election. Dichotomy of both the space and society into the town and the countryside generates different election results constantly. A key aim of this paper is to assess the extent of rurality concerning the electoral support of relevant political parties operating on the Slovak political scene after the groundbreaking elections held in 1998 until ballots of 2010 not only at national, but also at the regional level. Evaluation of level and dynamics in socio-political cleavage between rural and urban space is one of the most important research ambitions of this study. We shall note the position of particular regions in Slovakia in terms of size and acceleration of the conflict and try to categorize them according to the similarity in values of indicators characterizing this social discrepancy. On the basis of found facts, we shall appraise the electoral success of political parties in urban and rural environment and compose the regional typization of Slovakia concerning the party representatives of urban and rural environment. Finally, we shall evaluate the potential of the regions to be future outbreak sites of latent cleavage influencing their differential political inclination.

Electoral behaviour in the Kraków metropolitan area: 1993–2011

“…In the KMA, this trend is found as well: the political distance of rural areas from the city of Kraków in the KMA's suburban zone was reduced with respect to the pro-market liberal option. Plešivčák (2013) in his research analyses the level and dynamics of socio-political urban-rural cleavage in Slovakia in the years 1998-2010. In its conclusions, the study indicates that even though the degree of socio-political conflict between urban and rural communities in the largest Slovakian cities is higher than average, it is significantly declining.…”

“…As for other Central European post-communist countries, the state of socio-political urban-rural fractured has been analysed in Hungary by Körösényi (1999), in the Czech Republic by Kostelecký & Čermák (2004) and Kostelecký (2005), and in Slovakia by Plešivčák (2013).…”

Themes, approaches, and methods in the geographical analysis of Czech and Slovak parliamentary elections: a systematic review

“…Less often used methods include ecological inference methods (Bahna and Krivý 2016;Bahna et al 2018;Lysek et al 2020), spatial econometrics (Plešivčák 2014b), component analysis (Kerekeš 2020), and regional typization (Plešivčák 2013b). Plešivčák (2014a) conducted a study review dealing with elections in urban and rural regions.…”

“…Eight studies work with a territorial unit of functional urban regions (Plešivčák 2011a;2011b;2012a;2012b;2012c;2013b;2014b). Some studies analyze the election results from 1918 to 1938 using historical juridical districts as a territorial unit (Daněk 1993;Kostelecký et al 2014;Král 2016).…”