The average age of municipal council candidates is 47 and a half years – the highest for the age for which data is available. Young people, but also the elderly, appear on the lists of candidates for most major parties for non-electoral positions.
Municipal elections have stopped slowing down in the past decade: the number of applicants for council seats has fallen from 234 thousand to 195 thousand since 2014. Also evident is the fact that it is not possible to get the younger generation as candidates by the age of the candidates. It rose less than two years during the same period.
KSČM is known to be unsuccessful in this light. But other parties – perhaps surprisingly – have gotten much older since the last municipal elections. The average age of candidates by the Communist Party has increased by 2.8 years since 2018. Candidates for ANO with age 3.7 years in four years, for ČSSD by 3.6 years and SPD by 2.9 years.
The reasons are different: they don’t welcome newcomers to the candidate lists (yes), they welcome newcomers, but they are older (SPD), or they don’t have access to newcomers well and, if so, older; So often they get involved in alliances (ČSSD).
How did we analyze the candidates?
We show in the graphs the political parties that have proposed more than a thousand names in this year’s elections. We determine party affiliation based on the indicator party proposal. Thanks to this, we see the party’s candidates even if it is running in a coalition. We work with open data from Election official websitethat began with the 2006 elections.
To identify defectors, loyalists, newcomers, and retired candidates, we algorithmically determine whether the 2018 and 2022 rosters are the same candidate. Since CZSO does not publish a unique identifier, we have to rely on information about first name, last name and age. Some candidates will not communicate – usually women who change their surname after marriage. The election is a little late. We assume the candidates are four years old between elections, but if their birthday is between September 23 this year and October 6 last year, they will lose the link again.
For most parties in the government coalition, the change of cadres is going better: the candidates of STAN, KDU-ČSL and ODS are less than a year old. The Christian Democrats are very successful in this regard. Huge base by Czech standards – The party will send 13.6 thousand people to elections this yearmore than anything else – They have been able to renew since at least 2006 regardless of successes or failures at the national level.
On the contrary, advances in parliamentary politics contribute to the aging of pirates. The average age of female municipal candidates has increased from 34 to 40 years since 2010. However, it is still, by a large margin, the youngest of the parliamentary parties.
Top 09 candidates elected by election Significantly decreases They are growing up at the same time. It is the only one that has not done well in transferring the success of the government to the local level – Perhaps because they compete mostly in big cities and usually in coalitions.
The average age of all candidates including minor parties and independents has increased by 0.6 years compared to the previous elections. Almost the same between elections The average lifespan of the Czech population will increase.
The sites we show in the graphs tend to age faster. There seem to be two reasons: contact with larger parties on the one hand represents a greater opportunity for a position in the representative office, and at the same time brand loyalty is more important to them than local movements. Both reasons lead to less turnover of candidates.
How old are the juniors?
In order to maintain fitness, most aspects at the domestic level have major new players – The SPD has a lot of them One of the “loyal” candidates who stuck to the party since the last election. So it is very important that the parties reach.
So we divided the new arrivals into groups by age (juniors under 36, seniors from 65, and working in between the two) and gender. The lines in the graphs visually separate the age groups, and we show men in blue and women in red.
Among the parties noted, pirates and communists are exceptional: the former mainly appeal to the young, the latter to the elderly. As for the other parties, the number of age groups changes relatively smoothly, however, the center-right bloc of government partners as well as the Green Party appeal to younger candidates more than the parliamentary opposition and the non-parliamentary pledge.
Women on candidate lists usually hold from a quarter of the seats (municipal elections) to one third (parliamentary elections); Their representation tends to be higher in left-wing parties and in the Green Party. Within a few decades, the number had grown by per cent units. However, elective positions are often reserved for men, so the actual representation of women in politics is less.
The good news is that women make up nearly 40 percent of newcomers. However, the figure is distorted by the low percentage units of the algorithm by which we select newcomers from the lists – for women, due to frequent change of surname after marriage, they sometimes do not associate the same candidate in the past and current elections and incorrectly consider her a newcomer (See the box How we analyzed the candidates). With the exception of ODS, TOP 09 and SPD, women’s representation among newcomers in the observed parties appears to be above 40 percent, and more than half in the case of the Greens.
Optional sites
A number of parties have put younger candidates and women on their candidates in the role of “Bush”. Appointing them to non-elective positions. In the following charts, we note who holds the position of female chief candidates for each party and who holds non-elective positions. Again, we differentiate between three age groups, as well as between men and women. We only monitor the first thirty candidate positions, and there are actually very few candidates in other positions.
The gray lines separating the young, middle-aged, and old form a path for most parties: candidates of political production age top the list, while young and old candidates make up only one percent of them. In the trend of non-discretionary positions, the number of age minorities is increasing, and the trend is stabilizing around the tenth position. The ANO and ČSSD filters are usually funnel-shaped.
Again, the pirates and KSČM are unusual: the first party assures a high percentage of young people in all positions, including the head candidate. There is no pirate candidate across the republic who is the leader who is over 64 years old.
There is a clear effort by KSM to fill elective positions with young people – It is in the course of the party any person of working age. From the ninth rank, the elders already dominate the candidates.
