ELECTORAL SUPPORT OF POLITICAL PARTIES : CHANGING PATTERNS IN THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF PRAGUE'S METROPOLITAN REGION IN 1996 - 2006

This thesis deals with geographic analysis of political behaviour. It is spatially limited to a metropolitan area of Prague, the capital and biggest city in the Czech Republic. Political behaviour of voters is analysed on election results of parlamentary elections between 1996 and 2006. The analysis uses agragate data and is undertaken in three main different sets of spatial units. Rusults are then compared inbetween them to confirm or refute obtained findings. The main goal of this thesis is to discover and analyse existing spatial patterns of political support for individual parties. As the czech political system is based on proportional representation, five main political parties and parties groupings are analysed. The second goal is to capture the change in political behaviour over the sudied time period. To discover how high the spatial stability of different party support is and which parts of the metropolitan region has undergone the biggest change in political behaviour. Last goal is to try to explain what changes has the process of resididential suburbanization done to the existing spatial structure of party support. The main conclusion is that the existing pattern of political party support has been on the level of main morphological zones reversed. The main right-wing party of the czech..