Local and more local: Impact of size and organization type of settlement units on candidacy
Description
It is replication dataset for article "Local and More Local: Impact of Size and Organization Type of Local Municipal Communities on Candidacy". Dataset is based on several sources. From the nomenclature of the parts of municipalities in the RUIAN database of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre (CUZK), we received information about settlement units recognized by the state authority. We accommodated the nomenclature for every election. We excluded non-existing parts and inscribed newly established parts of municipalities. Individual changes in the definition of the part are noted in detail in “Přehled změn RSO” administered by the CZSO. Because the presence of two electoral arenas can lead to lower interest in candidacy in one of them, statutory cities, which elect unitary whole-city councils simultaneously with multiple city-district-based local councils, were excluded from the dataset. Even though the criterion relates only to 7 cities, these cities encompass nearly ¼ of the population of the Czech Republic. For this reason, our analysis deals only with municipalities under 150 000 inhabitants. The results of the analysis, therefore, cannot give plausible evidence about candidacy in units of municipalities considered to be cities in a European context. To every settlement unit, we assigned information about the number of candidates, which was found as the summary of the lists of candidates provided by open data from the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO). Data defining independent variables were added to the dataset. The number of units in a municipality was assigned to every settlement unit. Settlement units in municipalities containing two or more units were assigned to the category of amalgamated municipalities. Municipalities including just one settlement unit were assigned to the category of non-amalgamated municipalities. Addresses of local offices were obtained from the “Electronic server of local authorities” (ePusa), and through the linking of addresses of local offices to appropriate units, we were able to determine central versus peripheral units. Data comprising socio-economic characteristics of the population of settlement unit came from the Population and Housing Census (2011).