The Influence of Territorially Specific Factors on the Formation of the Political Attitudes of Voters

Are differences in the political attitudes of the regional population a mere reflection of the social and demographic composition of individual territorial units or is the regional context in which the political attitudes are formed itself important? The article presents the authors’ answers to this question, based on empirical analyses of the data from four representative surveys that were conducted simultaneously in four different regions in the Czech Republic. The results of the analyses show that the populations in the individual regions differ not only in terms of electoral behaviour but also in more general political attitudes. The regional differences of political attitudes are not simply a reflection of the differences in the social and demographic composition of the regional populations. While differences in the social structures do contribute to differences in political attitudes, people’s political attitudes are also significantly influenced by the regional social, political, and economic situation. In the statistical models, the contextual variables tend to be as important as the compositional variables. Different political attitudes vary in terms of their sensitivity to the influence of contextual underlying factors.