Collected and Available to the Public: Results of National Elections in Municipalities of Slovakia between 1929 and 2006

The article reports on completion of an electronic database, which is now available to public. The database comprises results of free national elections in all Slovak municipalities between the years 1929 and 2006. It is based on data found in the National Archives of the Czech Republic (on elections to Chamber of Deputies of the National Assembly in 1929 and 1935, and on Constituent Assembly election in 1946), data from the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic (on elections to Slovak National Council in 1990 and 1992, and to National Council of the Slovak Republic from 1994 to 2006), and on census data from the years 1930, 1991, and 2001. The database is accessible on the Slovak Archive of Social Data website (http://sasd.sav.sk/sk/) and is available in two formats – Excel 2007 and SPSS.
The whole data matrix consists of 3,627 rows by 280 columns and with only minor exceptions, each row represents a municipality. Perhaps the most difficult part of the work was to organize the data so as to depict the identity of each municipality in its development.
In elections 1929, 1935, 1946, and 1990, votes from several municipalities were recorded in other nearby municipalities. The database informs about such redirections as well. Furthermore, several minor errors were found in the original data on the elections in 1929 and 1935; all amendments are documented in the user manual.
In the near future, the database and a user manual in Slovak should be supplemented with results of parliamentary election in 2010 and a comprehensive manual in English.