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Why Citizens of Šiauliai Vote for Left, while Citizens of Panevėžys Vote for Right? Lithuania is a young country, but still has a high quality of studies of voters’ behaviour. Scholars such as Ainė Ramonaitė, Mažvydas Jastramskis and others wrote solid works in this area, for instance, “Political anatomy of Lithuania“. But these works are focused mainly on national level, so we still have a lack of studies on the local level. Especially we do not have studies of political models of cities, which are well-known in Western countries. Therefore we need a research in this field. Wherefore I made a decision to create a first work in this area of studies. My Bachelor’s paper is the first effort to try to find the reasons why economically parallel cities are so politically dissimilar. This situation we can be seen see when we look at Šiauliai and Panevėžys, which are fourth and fifth biggest cities in Lithuania. These cities look like the twins in the case of the income sources of the citizens, people’s professions, kinds of economic activities, demographical situation and ethnic composition. There are some differences in the level of education of citizens and the percentage of believers. The first distinction is not so important because many researches revealed that a high level of education could be the cause why people choose center- right parties, which are the Liberals' Movement of the Republic of Lithuania and Homeland Union- Lithuanian Christians Democrats’ (HU-LCD) party, but in Šiauliai, where the number of educated residents is higher, the situation is absolutely different. It is a stronghold of The Social Democratic Party of Lithuania (SDPL), while Panevėžys is a stronghold of HU-LCD. Therefore we used one difference method, which was focused on the unequal percentages of believers in these cities. Moreover, in order to suggest the hypothesis of the reasons of such phenomena we used the ideas of Herbert Kitschelt. In order to find the main causes of current situation we had twenty one qualitative interviews with an experts of both cities. There were professional politicians, signatories of the act of Mach 11, priests, academics, members of Sąjūdis. During the process of research we found out that there is a huge path dependency. There were several reasons why citizens of Šiauliai vote for the left ant citizens of Panevėžys vote for the right, but the main reason of this situation is the influence of the church. The church is much stronger in Panevėžys than in Šiauliai, because of the interwar period when Šiauliai was a centre of atheism, while Panevėžys was a centre of bishopric. During this period Šiauliai had an extremely strong social democrats party due to the high level of industrialization, tremendous number of workers and influential atheists such as dr. Jonas Šliūpas, a mayor of city Jackus Sondeckis. At the same time the huge number of citizens of Panevėžys were peasants, who believed in God. Furthermore, there was the most popular bishop in Lithuania Kazimieras Paltarokas, who had an amazing influence on people’s minds. Moreover, peasents had property, which was a tilth, whereas workers did not have the property or much less than the peasants. Because of these aspects, during the times of partisan war against Soviet Union, residents of Panevėžys fought much more intensively against atheistic occupants than citizens of Šiauliai. Furthermore, citizens of Panevėžys were taught the truth of faith by the nuns. Moreover, the Military Airport and military factory “Nuklonas” were founded in Šiauliai, as a consequence, there was the prohibition to register the exiles, but this situation was different in Panevėžys. Therefore the number of exiles is much bigger than in Šiauliai. This aspect is tremendously important, because the exiles are the most loyal voters of HU-LCD party. These and other reasons have huge influence on current situation. |
