Left, Right, Left, Right… Centre: Ideological Position of Andrej Babiš’s ANO
Left, Right, Left, Right… Centre: Ideological Position of Andrej Babiš’s ANO

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the ideological position of a newly formed business-firm party called ANO in the contemporary political environment of the Czech Republic. Although the advent of the party was truly rapid and ANO is a fairly unique formation, it is possible to employ some conventional analytical tools to reveal the party’s ideological position. Firstly, I show that ANO is a vote-seeking party and it is therefore possible to analyse it in accordance with a Downsian spatial modelling. Next, I describe a roll call analysis method that is able to objectively identify the party’s ideological position based on legislators’ parliamentary votes. After I form several hypotheses, a data set consisting of 8,559 roll calls of 215 members of the Chamber of Deputies is depicted. Finally, the results show that ANO is located in the ideological centre, closer to social democrats rather than to right-wing parties. Besides this, ANO covers a smaller ideological space compared to traditional political parties. Finally, the results do not anticipate a potential split of ANO in the near future since the party’s legislators have acted cohesively in the parliament so far.

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