In Slovakia, participatory budgeting represents one of the relatively new instruments of political participation. It has been used since 2011. Currently it is present on both levels of territorial self-government (i.e., local level and regional level). Nevertheless, its implementation into practice is only a gradual one, as the number of local and regional governments using participatory budgeting is limited. Furthermore, both local and regional governments are currently exposed to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, so a question arises as to how they managed to deal with the situation and how it affected the implementation of approved participatory budgets. The aim of this paper is to identify how the local governments in Slovakia approached the implementation of participatory budgeting in 2020. With regard to the above-mentioned goal, we focus on the following: the implementation of participatory budgeting before 2020, its continuation in 2020 and, if maintained, its adjustment to the "period of social distancing". The findings show that there is a large group of local and regional governments that have decided to either suspend or cancel the implementation of participatory budgeting. Out of those who opted for its implementation, one group did not need to significantly adapt to the distancing restrictions, another group managed to hold potential meetings before the first restrictions came into force. It was only the latter group that faced the most serious challenge. However, active employment of online tools along with the use of the period of released measures proved crucial for the implementation of participatory budgeting.

This paper deals with the issue of participatory budgeting as one of the newer tools of political participation. Its aim is to characterise the current situation in the Slovak Republic at two levels of territorial self-administration (self-governing regions and municipalities). To reach defined aims, it monitors the existence of legislative settings at the national level, the existence of individual settings at the observed levels and subsequently the practical application of the participatory budgeting itself. Procedures associated with the study of documents are used in article; the obtained data are summarized, described and compared mutually. In addition to laws and regulations issued by self-government units, the source of data is also the regional and local self-government units’ official websites. In the absence of one universal definition of the participatory budgeting rules at the national level, the findings have shown that there are relatively extensive conditions for implementing participatory budgeting with its specific settings defined by self-administrations. In Slovakia, participatory budgeting is only gradually introduced into the internal rules, which reflects a relatively small number of municipalities or self-governing regions, which ultimately use it effectively.

This is an exploratory cross-case analysis of political communication strategies of selected youth political organizations on the social network Facebook. The main objectives of this paper are to capture the topics and frequency of posting of Youth Political Organization on Facebook. Secondary, the study aims to capture the analytical approach categories/objectives: themes and actors. It focuses on the 3-month period from December 2020 to February 2021. Relevant youth political organizations in Slovakia and the Czech Republic are compared with youth political organizations operating at the European level. The organizations either belong directly to the kin political party or have the status of a supporting organization. At the European level, they are also affiliated to a European political party or are a supporting organization of a European political party. The data source is the official profiles of youth political organizations on the social network Facebook. Data processing is based on content analysis of published posts. Content analysis focuses on topics, the frequency of topics, the occurrence of keywords in the overall set of posts, and identifying attitudes to topics. The obtained data are evaluated by descriptive statistics. The presentation of the data is supplemented by tables, including graphical processing using the Voyant Tools text analysis tool. Key findings indicate that COVID-19 pandemic is the most communicated topic both on national and European level. Czech and Slovak cases seek to gain support or create conflict based on selected topics, while European level forms an area of cooperation among organizations.

In a democratic environment, political equality implies proportionality. Achieving this in an electoral setting can be complicated and unrealistic. The aim of this article is to investigate the logic, approach and method of creating constituencies in the elections for Slovak self-governing regions in 2022. We track the key attributes related to proportionality: the legislation, the actual creation of constituencies, the mechanisms used for the redistribution of mandates and the achievement of proportionality in individual constituencies within particular regions. Our results indicate considerable disproportionality within the constituencies of particular self-governing regions, which is mainly caused by the lack of effective legislation, the different approaches of authorities in creating constituencies and the absence of limits to the violation of electoral and thus political equality.

V roku 2022 sa uskuto?nili prv? spojen? komun?lne a krajsk? vo?by. Jedn?m zo z?merov tejto zmeny bolo nav??enie volebnej ??asti, ktor? bola dlhodobo najproblematickej?ia v pr?pade obsadzovania org?nov do samospr?vnych krajov. V kontexte toho j...