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Research on invalid voting has expanded rapidly over the past few years. This review article for the first time examines its principal findings and provides a new theoretical perspective on the origins of invalid votes based on a two-dimensional framework. The main results of 54 studies using both individual-level and aggregate-level data as well as the results of experimental and qualitative studies are analysed. The meta-analysis of all existing aggregate-level studies finds that compulsory voting, quality of democracy, fragmentation and closeness of the electoral race play important roles in explaining invalid voting. On the other hand, the research is accompanied by many theoretical and empirical contradictions that hamper the accumulation of knowledge in this field. We therefore conclude by suggesting the challenges for future research.

The active involvement of citizens in decision-making processes via geoparticipatory spatial tools is becoming a popular research field among geographers, GIScientists, environmental psychologists, political scientists and many others. This paper presents the idea of the Index of geoparticipation – an indicator-based index divided into three dimensions (communication, participation, transparency) that helps to evaluate the state of geoparticipation among Czech municipalities. It describes the current state of geoparticipation at the municipality level in Czechia. It aims to fill the research gap in finding which components of geoparticipation at the municipality level are being used, and how their use is affected by the size of municipalities and their membership of Local Agenda 21 networks. The paper builds upon an extensive dataset collected by the authors from all Czech municipalities (n=6 258) and presents various “shades” of geoparticipation in Czechia. Highlights for public administration, management and planning: • The highest average values of the Index of geoparticipation were obtained from the regions’ capital cities, followed by statutory cities, municipalities with extended powers, municipalities which are members of the Healthy Cities of the Czech Republic (HCCZ) network and cities. • HCCZ member municipalities use geoparticipatory tools significantly more than the rest of the Czech municipalities • The communication dimension is the most widely implemented pillar of the Index of geoparticipation • There is no significant relationship between social exclusion and geoparticipation at the nationwide level

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The mapping of election results has long been a popular topic among cartographers, journalists, data scientists and infographic authors. However, their work usually concludes with simple visualizations of a single election, and in most cases only the winning party is represented. Can we tell the story of a political party over two decades via maps? What were the reasons for the rise and fall of such party; in our case the Czech Social Democrats? Moreover, how were the changes in voting patterns spatially distributed and manifested? With our paper, we explore voting patterns as well as the voting history of specific parties related to the fate of Social Democrats in the Czech Republic in several national elections from 2006 to 2017. We would like to invite other political scientists to explore the election results in their countries, not just over time, but also in space, and ideally via maps.

This contribution is a complex analysis of the geographic voting patterns in the 2020 Slovak parliamentary election using methods such as Geographically Weighted Regression, Hierarchical Regression Models, and Ecological Inference. It is focused on the winner of the 2020 parliamentary election, the populist OĽaNO, and on the loser, the traditional left-wing SMER-SD – within the context of electoral support and voter transition in comparison to the 2016 parliamentary election, and in part to the 2019 presidential election. The article contributes to the underdeveloped discourse relating to the spatial support of political parties in Slovakia and finds how the selected socio-economic indicators explain the varying voting patterns. The main finding is that Slovakia is an internally heterogeneous country. The socio-demographic factors have a differentiated (either positive or negative) effect on the electoral support for Slovakian parties. As a result, voting patterns differ not only between the western and eastern parts of the country but also between districts within a common geographic area or region. This reveals the complex set of dividing lines in the country and indicates future trends in Slovakian politics.

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