Role of sub-municipal identities in forming trust to municipal authorities in amalgamated municipalities

Local identities connected to pre-merger jurisdictions tend to conform to the older communities and follow their historical paths. The feelings connected to local communities are usually strong and remain salient even in the long-term. Amalgamation, therefore, results not only in an increase in municipal size, but also in the creation of a number of self-identified, geographically defined intra-municipal communities aggregated under one authority. Remaining sub-municipal identities may affect the relation towards the municipality in various aspects, including the political one. In this paper we investigate how identity related to some specific part of municipality affects the trust to municipal council. The identity is measured by battery of questions about closeness of respondents to various parts of the municipality and to the municipality as a whole, that allows us to distinguish between voters with strong and weak sub-municipal identity. We expect that people with stronger attachment to just a part of municipality will express lower trust to local council that those identified with the whole municipality. In our analysis, we will control for political efficacy, personal contact with local politicians, voting for parties in local government and socio-demographic characteristics of respondents. The analysis will be conducted on data from exit-poll related to 2022 Czech local elections covering about 100 sum-municipal units in 60 municipalities. The multilevel binomial logistic regression will be applied as method of analysis.