Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2021, 57(1): 3-23 | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2021.003

Politics as a Vocation? The Impact of the Remuneration of Local Representatives on the Electoral Competition

Milan Školník, Michael Haman

Filozofická fakulta, Univerzita Hradec Králové

This article examines the impact that the remuneration of municipal representatives has on the political competition in the Czech Republic. Municipal representatives can perform their office either full time (an 'engaged' representative) or part time (a 'disengaged' representative). It is common in some small Czech municipalities for there to be no full-time representatives, and even mayors are disengaged. There is no central database or website in Czech Republic that contains a list of all the municipalities and disengaged representatives and it was thus very difficult to obtain the necessary data. However, the authors discovered an original method for determining whether representatives are (dis)engaged and created a unique dataset of almost 6000 Czech municipalities. They used a specific item in the expenditures of every municipality's budget that concerns compulsory social insurance payments and they sorted municipalities according to whether their representatives worked full time or part time before the 2018 Czech municipal elections. They used ordinary least square regression models to reach conclusions. The results revealed that the presence of full-time representatives before the municipal elections increased the number of candidates per seat. Therefore, the authors found that there is greater electoral competitiveness in municipalities with full-time representatives who have higher salaries.

Keywords: remuneration, electoral competition, local politics, elections, mayors

Received: October 29, 2020; Accepted: January 18, 2021; Published: March 25, 2021  Show citation