A Study of the Impact of Unemployment on Local Elections: The Case of Poland

Abstract

This paper is trying to analyse the impact of the unemployment on the voting behaviour in local elections. The study concerns election district no 34 in Poland, which consists of nine counties. So, the distribution of votes to campaign committees in the elections to the regional assembly in 2014 against the background of the unemployment rate were the subjects of the empirical study. For this purpose, the Mann–Whitney U test was applied in order to examine the significance of the unemployment rate on the voting behaviour in the counties of this election district.