Abstract
The paper studies preferential votes in system of proportional representation through theory of leadership as the aspects of electoral behaviour of voters in relation to political candidates. More specifically, based on theories of leadership, I suppose there are certain qualities that make a candidate more acceptable for voters to vote.
Over history, these variables have changed; features which people thought made a good leader were often genetic and aesthetic (visible), while in recent times, voters favour those people with intellectual and behavioural (non-visible) skills. In my quantitative study of elections to National Council of Slovakia with 6000 number of cases (more than 4500 candidates) over years from 1998 to 2016 and across 10 established political parties, I test how sex, age, education, number of legislative initiatives, number of interpellations and high positions in party or government affect total number of preferential votes acquired by a candidate.
In my regression (based on two statistical models, one for all candidates and one for elected only), I find out that none of the variables but those which make candidate visible matter; only education and high positions in party or government are statistically significant and reach high coefficient (simultaneously).