Vicious circle of peripheries: Representation of sub-municipal units in local election manifestos in amalgamated municipalities

Abstract

Merged municipalities create unequal opportunities for sub-municipal units according to their relative size and administrative centrality. Because electoral manifestos provide the basis for policy-making on services, we analyse how the mentions of different sub-municipal units are distributed in manifestos. We analyze the manifestos of 381 parties in 82 amalgamated municipalities in the 2022 local elections in Czechia, focussing on the effects of size, administrative centrality, and presence of candidates from the units on candidate lists. The probability of mentioning a unit is affected by the presence of candidates from the unit on candidate lists, and that the probability of mentioning is very low for small and peripheral units without candidates. The results show the systematic differences in attention parties pay to various sub-municipal units and crucial importance of unit-based candidates for the substantive representation within the amalgamated municipalities.