Abstract
An analysis of national and regional elections reveals that elections are highly nationalized in Slovakia. However, the nationalization of regional elections does not translate into second-order election effects. Due to radically different electoral systems used for regional and national elections, political parties are induced to form alliances in regional but not in national elections and electoral alliances crossing the government-opposition divide are abundant in regional elections. Another notable and important regional election dynamic is the growing success of independent candidates. This trend can be interpreted as ‘departyisation’ of regional politics rather than regionalization. Regional elections may be conceived as ‘barometer elections’ whereby voters do not use their vote to punish parties in national government. Rather, the regional vote indicates the electoral prospects of parties in the upcoming national election.
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- 1.
The so-called nodal regions are characterized by existence of a single center (town) with multiple links (economic, transport, social and so on) to its hinterland.
- 2.
The original government proposal suggested to call the region župa (county) and the directly elected regional president župan. These names can be traced back to pre-1918 terms. Instead, the technocratic labels of respectively ‘higher territorial unit’ and the ‘president of the higher territorial unit’ were chosen.
- 3.
These include over 20 geographical areas, for instance, Spiš, Liptov, Orava, Turiec, Zemplín and Gemer, with their borders established as early as in the fifteenth century (Volko and Kiš 2007, p. 21).
- 4.
Altogether, only eight deputies took part in the parliamentary debate and none of them gave a justification for the proposed bloc voting system. A private member’s bill proposing a single transferable vote system got support of less than a third of the deputies and was defeated. See transcript of the parliamentary proceedings of the National Council, 4 July 2001, available at http://www.nrsr.sk/dl/Browser/Default?legId=13&termNr=2.
- 5.
If, for example, three deputies are to be elected in the electoral districts, the three candidates with the largest number of votes are elected.
- 6.
A subsequent analysis (results not shown) reveals that since the 1998 national election the Western regions contribute most to dissimilarity in the vote across electorates. The four Western regions include the capital Bratislava, a stable bastion of center-right parties, two regions with high concentration of Hungarian minority and a region with a strong affiliation towards the leftist Smer.
- 7.
Please note that our alternative method of treating electoral alliances deviates from the approach followed in the other chapters of this book. In Chap. 1, Schakel and Dandoy suggest to allocate the vote share for the alliance to the electorally strongest member of the alliance whereby electoral strength is assessed on the basis of the results of the previous national election. This approach is suitable when the electorally strongest party does not vary much across time and when there is one strong party competing on the left as well as on the right of the ideological left-right (economic) dimension. This is not the case in Slovakia where alliances tend to consists of two or more electorally equally strong parties and where parties with left and right ideological profiles frequently join the same alliance.
- 8.
Even though exact numbers of deputies for each party cannot be determined from the official election results, each political party headquarter knows how many of their members have won a regional seat. In 2013, the daily Smer published that the largest number of deputies (161) were Smer nominees. Christian democrats were the second largest party with 57 elected deputies. Hence, the 73 elected independent deputies would be the second largest ‘party’ group in Slovakia. See http://www.sme.sk/volby-vuc/2013/vysledky/.
- 9.
The explanatory potential of the structural variables (economic status, urban versus rural residence, secular versus religious identification and center-periphery status) with respect to electoral gains of political parties in the national elections varies between elections (see Pink and Voda 2012, pp. 239–42).
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Rybář, M., Spáč, P. (2017). Slovakia: The Unbearable Lightness of Regionalization. In: Schakel, A. (eds) Regional and National Elections in Eastern Europe. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51787-6_10
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