Women Mayors in Slovakia

Abstract

In Slovakia, the evidence reports women underrepresentation in local politics. In this paper, the spatial insight to the numeric women representation in local governments at the position of the mayor (elected local authority) in Slovakia in recent 20 years is given. The aim of the paper is to identify the areas, where the representation of women mayors is the most evident and how it evolves in time. For better visibility of results on the map, local data for 2,924 local governments (municipalities) are aggregated to the district level (79 districts at LAU1) and the shares of women mayors on all mayors in a district are displayed for five election periods since 2002. Results confirm the increasing trend of women representation in local governments. Beside it, they unveil that the increase of the portion of women mayors is observed firstly in the south – center part and edge north-eastern part of Slovakia. These areas are characterized by high fragmentation of residential structure, low GDP per capita and higher ethnolinguistic fragmentation. Then the increase of women representation in local governments subsequently continued in south-eastern and south-western part of Slovakia.