Analysis of factors affecting young people in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic

This thesis analyzes the factors that influence decisions of young people in elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic. Specifically, it focuses on the citizens of the Czech Republic citizens aged 18 to 28 years. The research is carried out in elections to the House of Commons in 2010. As shown by earlier studies from the United States or European countries (Abramson, 1974; Knoke 1974; Baker, 1978; Inglehart, Norris 1999; Anderson, 2000; C. Baslevent H. Kirmanoglu 2008), for young people are dominant other factors than for older generations in public elections. My goal is to detect the influence of psychological, social and political determinants of the electoral vote and determine what the characteristics of young leftist and rightist voters are. Furthermore this thesis validates some hypotheses, based on various studies (Knoke 1974, Abramson 1974, Thorisdottir et al. 2007). As a method of analyzing the dependence between explained variable and explanatory variables I used multinominal logistic regression to testing hypotheses investigating the influence of parents political orientation, household earnings, and traditionalism to party election. Null hypotheses expecting no influence of these variables were rejected. Alternative hypotheses were confirmed only in certain categories of hypotheses investigating parents political orientation influence to party election