Project: VEGA 2/0115/23
Duration: 1. 1. 2023 - 31. 12. 2025
Principal Investigator: Mgr. Jozef Zagrapan, PhD.
Scientific co-workers: Miloslav Bahna, Silvia Miháliková, Ángel Torres-Adán, Ondrej Buchel, Vladimír Hurban

The project summary: Elections are one of the most important features of democratic regimes and one of the key sources of legitimacy for governing officials. While the results and characteristics of parliamentary elections, along with the electoral system, parties, and candidates involved in the competition at the country level are well-studied, our knowledge about the local electoral arena in Slovakia is surprisingly limited, mainly when it comes to elections of members of bodies of communal self-government. The goal of this project is to fill in this significant gap in the research on municipal elections in Slovakia. Firstly, our aim is to manually collect unique complete data about candidates and electoral results, which are otherwise unavailable and not published by any of the central bodies. Secondly, based on these data we will draw conclusions about competition in elections, electoral turnout, candidates and other characteristics of the electoral system that is not widely used in the world.