Sex, age and education of citizens – factors affecting preferential voting? Territorial analysis of the 2023 parliamentary elections in Slovakia

Abstract

Preferential voting is becoming an increasingly popular tool through which voters can prioritize their preferred candidate within the candidate list of a given political party, thereby influencing the intra-party struggle for public office to some extent. Candidate information is known, but which voters tend to use their preferential vote? Are they men or women, younger or older people, voters with lower or higher educational attainment? The presented study aims to evaluate the relationship between preferential voting and selected socio-demographic variables at the level of Slovakia, its regions and districts. We are analysing the results of the 2023 elections to the National Council of the Slovak Republic alongside socio-demographic data from the 2021 census. In order to identify a possible statistical relationship between the investigated variables, the method of linear correlation analysis was applied, using the Pearson correlation coefficient. The results indicate that at the national level, considering data from more than 2,900 municipalities in Slovakia, no relationship between preferential voting and selected socio-demographic characteristics of the population was demonstrated. Certain patterns were observed within spcecific population groups at a lower spatial-hierarchical level (in the case of the Bratislava region and Žilina region, and in selected districts of the Bratislava, Trnava, Žilina and Banská Bystrica regions), but the informative value of several of them is limited by the low number of cases entering the correlation analysis.