Whose skin is in the game? Party candidates in the Czech Republic

Abstrakt

Party candidates are the essence of parties. They represent parties in public and importantly, bring them into office and power.

Thus, I track more than 150,000 personally unique local elections party candidates in the Czech Republic between 1994 and 2018. The results show that the running party members usually compose 20-60% of parties' members.

The average age of the party candidates often increases together with parties' ageing. During the last 25 years, the share of educated, and female party candidates rose notably.

Finally, the research design allows tracking party-switching between the years of local elections.

Klíčová slova

• Party members
• activism
• party switching
• candidate
• Czech Republic