Voting Behaviour of the Residents of the City of Ceske Budejovice

This diploma thesis is primarily focused on the issue of voters' behaviour in the city of Ceske Budejovice. The main goal of the thesis is the synchronic and diachronic comparative analysis of the election preferences of political parties standing in an election in the municipality. Three types of the elections are compared: the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic, the elections to the regional councils in the Czech Republic and the municipal elections. The next primary goal is to analyse whether the breaking points in the parliamentary party system from the years 2010 and 2013 were reflected in the preferences of the electors in the city of Ceske Budejovice, and whether the local party system followed them as well. The secondary objective lies in the comparison of aggregated preferences at the state and regional level with the behaviour of residents of Ceske Budejovice. This comparison is done for the particular political parties in all analysed types of elections. The diploma thesis consists of two main parts, which are the theoretical part and the analytical part. The theoretical part is focused on the general principles of the electoral process as well as three mentioned types of elections. Furthermore, there is a description of the parliamentary, regional and local party system development in the Czech Republic. The last chapter of the theoretical part deals with the theory of the voting behaviour at large and the factors that might influence it as well. The analytical part of the thesis is split into chapters according to the sorts of the research elections. Each chapter contains the analysis of the results and polls as well as the relative deviation from the national and regional preferences. In the last chapter of the analytical part, the links between the voters' behaviour and the social-economic factors, which might influence it, are contemplated