Geography of voter turnout in Slovak local elections (1994-2018): The effects of size and contagion on local electoral participation

The main goal of this article is to analyze spatial disparities in local electoral participation in Slovakia between 1994 and 2018 on a very detailed spatial structure of all (almost 3000) municipalities. To achieve this goal, methods of global and local spatial autocorrelation and spatial regression are used. Municipality-level analysis, then, provides three main results. First, cartographic presentations provide spatial evidence of highly stable patterns of electoral participation in Slovak municipalities. In the long term, there was no substantial inter-electoral change in the clustering of voter turnout in the different municipalities, except for an overall significant decline in the homogeneity of the clusters with low or high electoral turnout. Second, while there was some positive spatial autocorrelation of turnout between a concrete municipality and its surroundings, suggesting the existence of a contagion effect, this effect was not too strong and quickly waned with growing distance. Third, as especially the local elections in 2018 suggested that local political environment has its own dynamics that are increasingly independent of municipality size, a more detailed analysis of the local political context combining both quantitative and qualitative techniques should be a priority in the future.