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The article deals with various aspects of multiple-office holding. Although the phenomenon is especially influential in connection with legislators, the text offers a critical synthesis of recent findings on multiple-office holding on any level of political decision-making, thus providing a general framework for scholarly discussion and further research. The paper first provides a definition of the concept of multiple-office holding, which has been heretofore lacking in the Czech context. Causes of multiple-office holding are then delineated and divided into the three categories of historical reverberations, systemic elements and individual incentives. Both the positive and negative impacts on a political system are discussed as well. Next, three approaches (direct, indirect, and autoregulatory) of dealing with the practice of multiple-office holding, which are employed by particular political systems, are distinguished. Then, the role of a multiple-office holding in the Czech political system is depicted. The final part of the paper discusses a specific controversy linked to the phenomenon and criticises the lack of proper debates and scientific analyses on the practice.
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This article deals with the phenomenon of populism and the form it takes in the context of the Úsvit – národní koalice party and the Blok proti islámu coalition. The methodology of the analysis is based on Laclau’s account of populism and includes a discursive analysis of the populist mentality as a tool to form a vague argument against “bad” Islam culture. These assumptions are tested by a summative content analysis and are contextualized by a metaphor analysis. The results confirm all assumptions: Úsvit and Blok create a specific populist mentality based on a negative perception of Islam, a positive (but empty) national identity, and a simplified critique of the current establishment framed as tool for spreading bad culture which is based on the ideology of Muslims and Islam.
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This article investigates levels and predictors of support for democracy and two democratic principles (free speech and minority rights) among Czech 14- to 17-year-olds. An analysis of survey data collected in primary and secondary schools in four regions in 2014 (N = 1,959) reveals that among young Czechs general support for a democratic regime is relatively independent from more specific pro-democratic attitudes (although there is an association between general support for democracy and the abstract principle of freedom of speech). On a general level, democracy was supported by about two-thirds of adolescents in the sample. Similar or even higher levels of support were found for the two principles of democracy when presented in abstract terms. However, when these principles were presented to them in specific, less clear-cut contexts, support for them was much lower. Specifically, despite their strong support for free speech, about half of respondents supported restricting unconventional political activism. Moreover, a similar proportion of participants seemed to downplay minority rights when the majority rule was emphasised. Results of the analysis also revealed that support for different aspects of democracy was predicted by various psychological and socioeconomic factors.
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Research to date indicates that there is a positive association between the family-based socio-economic status (SES) of students and pupils’ own level of civic knowledge and attitudes toward voting. Many scholars think that social stratification of the electorate may lead to differential political representation of social groups thereby weakening the legitimacy of democracy among the lower social strata who participate least in politics. In this respect, it is often argued that one of the roles of schools is to reduce the difference in civic participation among students coming from families in different social strata. In this vein, this article examines if (a) type of classroom learning operationalised as ‘open classroom climate’ and (b) the socioeconomic composition of the class help to explain differences in students’ level of civic knowledge and attitudes toward voting. The data used in this study comes from the International Citizenship and Civic Education (ICCS) survey of 8th-grade student carried out in 2009. The multilevel modelling results show that the SES of a students’ family does help to explain differences in pupils’ civic knowledge and attitudes toward voting, and this classroom effect is especially strong among low SES students. In contrast, the presence of an open classroom climate has no significant effects on knowledge or attitudes to voting. This article concludes with a discussion of how these findings shape current understanding of how contrasting educational trajectories may have political consequences over the long-term.
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The text provides an analysis of the practical use of populism in electoral marketing by the movement ANO before the last election to the Czech Parliament in 2013. Its main goal is to link two heretofore unconnected concepts in political science and develop new insights and approaches in political research in the area of political marketing and populism. The first part describes theoretical approaches found in populism and electoral marketing, which are later applied to a case study reflecting the role of populism in the electoral marketing of ANO. In the following empirical part, we analyze how the election campaign staff of ANO implemented and formulated their electoral strategy, used internal market research, classified the electorate, and identified key segments of voters. In the next part, we focus on an analysis of the critical rhetoric of ANO leaders against the whole political establishment, including populist features in various arguments. The research of populism in ANO’s campaign is based on content analysis of the main party documents as well as an analysis of semi-structured interviews with ANO’s election strategists. We confirm that populism was a part of the identity of the movement, which helped it successfully mobilize the segment of disgruntled voters. The author’s perception of populism is based on the proto-political marketing concept, formulated by Henneberg and Eghbalian in 2002. This form of populism’s catch-all strategy of undifferentiated targeting, as well as a lack of clear or dominant ideological roots in ANO’s party profile (identity), would characterize the position of ANO as “The Tactical Populist” party in Henneberg’s typology. However, we question the significance Henneberg assigned to the Tactical Populist category.
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Electoral behavior in Slovakia is characterized by high instability. The study identifies the level of aggregated and individual volatility from a historical perspective, focusing specifically on the 2016 general election. Based on exit - poll data, it argue s that the traditional mainstream parties (KDH, SDKU, which failed to surpass the 5% threshold, and also Smer - SD) have lost many of their loyal core voters. The beneficiaries of voter mobility were the new anti - system parties – above all, We Are A Family a nd the extreme - right People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). The paper identifies a specific segment of the electorate – voters who abstained in 2012 but were mobilized for the more recent election. It argues that as the turnouts were about the same in 2012 an d 2016, other segments of voters were mobilized in the 2016 election. The fact that a large proportion of these voters decided for the parties We Are A Family and ĽSNS means that they were effectively addressed by a protest, anti - establishment alternative. Based on exit - poll data, the study argues that the level of abstention in the 2012 general election (excluding first - time voters) was the strongest predictor of voter preference for these two parties. Moreover, the extreme - right ĽSNS has been very success ful in attracting first - time voters.
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The party manifesto is a crucial document identifying a party’s ideological position. Measuring the response of political party manifestos to both the mean voter as well as party constituency positions remains extensively difficult given the lack of available data, but also the complex political realities and factors which the parties must take into consideration e.g. the economy, globalization, the demands of the market, and pressure from rival parties. In spite of these complexities, this article analyses the extent to which political parties reflect voter policy emphasis in their political manifestos. Through the content analysis of electoral manifestos the article determines the policy positions of Czech political parties during the 2010 and 2013 elections to the Lower House of the Parliament. Identifying also key voter policy preferences the article looks into the possible congruence between shifts in voter emphasis and changes in party electoral manifestos. Employing an approach not yet fully applied in academic research, the article examines shifts within ideological space, while focusing also on specific key policy areas. It concludes that in the short term – from the 2010 to 2013 parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic - political parties responded to shifts in voter policy emphasis in just one quarter of cases. The responsiveness differed significantly from one party to another.
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This article discusses the birth and early dynamics of Czech post-Communist anti Communism. It is based on the recognition that during the political takeover in November and December 1989 the policy of radical discontinuity remained a marginal, practically invisible and inaudible phenomenon in the mostly restful period of civil unrest. In the generally shared atmosphere of “national understanding,”which led to the historic compromise between the old, Socialist regime and the new,democratic regime, there was no room for a policy of radically settling scores with the Communist Party and the past. It was all the more surprising, therefore, when demands along these lines (the relinquishing of Party property, the outlawing of the Party, the punishment of criminal and treasonous politicians) appeared as if out of nowhere as early as the beginning of 1990, and then intensified. Memory was awakened and its numerous previously buried levels now emerged in public life.The incursion of the dark, unrecognized, and unprocessed past into the artificial reality of historic compromise caused frustration with ethics in the ranks of then ascent political élite. It was but a small step from the political prisoners’ awakened memories of crimes committed by the recently defeated regime to the now current problems with the “nomenclature brotherhoods” and “Communist mafias” in the provinces and in businesses throughout the country. Calls for a thorough settling of scores were heard with increasing frequency from Civic Forum, the victorious political movement, and they eventually became the catalyst of the pronounced division within the Civic Forum. But these calls never turned into a decisive political strategy and they managed to hold a dominant place only in the programmes of the less important parties and organizations like the Club of Politically-Engaged Non-Party Members (Klub angažovaných nestraníků – KAN) and the Confederation of Political Prisoners (Konfederace politických vězňů). After the break-up of the Civic Forum in late 1990 and early 1991, radical anti-Communism ran out of steam, and the right-of-center political parties that emerged from the erstwhile Civic Forum – primarily the Civic Democratic Party, the Civic Democratic Alliance,and the Christian Democratic Party – adapted the originally radical demands to a realistic policy of compromise based on the fact that the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, with the support of more than ten per cent of the electorate, remained a part of the democratic political system. The largely ignored sense of frustration with morals, stemming from the fundamental contradiction between the ideal (that is, comprehensive) possibilities of a policy of settling scores and the real (that is, limited) possibilities, was put off for later years, and remains a public problem to this day.
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Since the 1960s, voting behaviour in advanced democratic states has undergone substantial changes. From this period, the transformation of social structures, increased education, and the expansion of new technologies in the field of mass media, among other things, are evident. The transformation factors that affect the voter and his choice are sooner or later reflected in new theoretical concepts describing electoral behaviour, whether it was the theory of party identification, voter choice based on issues or rational choice. So far, however, none of the theories have adequately reflected the effect of consumer-style thinking on electoral behaviour. A new trend in political marketing – political branding – aims to correct precisely this deficiency. Due to the fact that the relevant research in the field of political branding and its impact on the voting behaviour of individuals is still in its infancy, we are faced with a lack of robust theoretical foundations. The text thus aims to clarify this situation by gathering and analysing existing branding concepts, pointing to their strengths and weaknesses. Also, it contributes to the theoretical discussion by linking research on political branding to existing theories of voting behaviour, asking whether the related branding concepts are able to explain the voting behaviour of voters as well as whether they are open to further amendments and modifications.
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This paper focuses on the employment of the participant role ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’ in the discourse of U.S. President George W. Bush in the period from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2003. The analysis presented in the paper has been conducted on the corpus of 92 speeches delivered by the speaker. The aim of the paper is to observe the formation of the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’groups on the basis of the involvement of the participant ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’. The theoretical framework for the analysis is grounded in the system of transitivity developed by M. A. K. Halliday. In the analytical part, the focus will be placed on the analysis of the participant ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’ that is involved in Material processes in George W. Bush’s discourse. It will be argued that the employment of this participant also contributed to positive presentation of ‘Us’ and to negative presentation of ‘Them’.
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The study uses the 2017 parliamentary elections results to analyses spatial patterns of votes in the city of Prague. A unique approach combining contextual and compositional data is introduced. Census data and data indicating the quality of life are reassigned to a shared entity – an address point, and analysed via automatic linear modelling. The model explained 69 % of spatial variance of votes share for the conservative TOP 09 party and the winning ANO 2011 movement, but only 19 % for the Pirate Party and the Mayors and Independence movement. Future research might focus on finding variables which would explain spatial variance of these parties’ vote shares. Abother possibility is the development of a methodology for studying votes spatiality within urban areas, in order to develop a robust theory.
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Political elites are the foundation of contemporary representative democracies. This reality highlights the unique scientific and practical significance of studies on political elites. The paper presents a non-standard research approach. Some aspects of using evolutionary game theory models to study the evolution of cooperative behaviours among representatives of political elites are presented. To that end, two models of 2 × 2 games were developed: a single-population and a two-population model. The first one assumes the existence of interactions between representatives of the same population, while the second focuses on interactions among individuals from two different populations. The analyses used two interaction schemes: Stag Hunt and Chicken. Standard replicator dynamics was employed to describe the evolutionary process. The results of the analyses are presented in a graphic form in phase diagrams. The presented approach should be treated as a supplement to traditional research approaches used in social sciences rather than as an alternative.
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Since the ‘migration crisis’ in 2015 at the latest, the politics of a broadly conceived Central Europe has been marked by conflicts over symbols, values and norms. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Austria, and the Czech Republic have witnessed divisive debates and campaigns over refugee quotas, women’s and gay rights, abortion laws and public monuments. As the term ‘culture wars’ was becoming ubiquitous, it remained ambivalent in its meaning and usage. The aim of this article is to identify a political logic of recent Central European cultural conflicts without leaning solely on the ideological explanation, e.g. the anti-liberal backlash thesis of Rupnik, and Krastev and Holms. By borrowing R. Brubaker’s conceptualizations of identity and populism, the article contends that it is possible to analyze culture wars as a repertoire of a populist political style. To do so, the article develops a critical perspective on culture wars, defined as polarizing conflicts in the arenas of the politics of memory, politics of identity and politics of morality. Culture wars are analyzed as a strategy of re-politicization of memory (especially of World War II), (civilizational) identity and public morality and a code used in struggles for political and cultural hegemony.
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As the partisan meaning attached to ‘populism’ has provided this word with a negative stigma used to demonize alternative discourses, this article seeks to fill two gaps in the populist literature. First, it aims at retrieving the term ‘populism’ from a spurious understanding and reintroducing a forgotten word, which has become a synonym of populism and contributed to its negative aura: demagogy. Populism (bottom-up) and demagogy (top-down) are defined as opposite terms. While this distinction could be easily grasped from their etymological roots, it takes on a different dimension when seen from a hegemonic perspective. Second, elaborating on Gramsci and Laclau’s theory, it provides a theoretical basis for the study of anti-populism. Like populism, anti-populism results from a dislocatory experience as it is (negatively) defined by its populist antagonist. Besides considering its negative dimension, the article discusses the positivization of the anti-populist discourse, which resides in the (re)production of broken normality. Demagogism is a weapon in the hegemonic struggle between different discourses that aims to restore mainstream common sense (normality) against a counter-hegemonic project (populism). Finally, the article suggests that beyond anti-populism, demagogism, understood as a normalizing practice, could potentially be applied in the empirical analysis of neo-traditionalist discourses.
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Public support for government institutions tends to increase in the face of threats such as armed conflict, terrorism, or natural disasters. This phenomenon, known as the 'rally-'round-the-flag' effect, has also been observed as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic in many countries. Citizens' trust in the government's good intentions and ability to handle a crisis is very important, as it gives government the legitimacy to take strong measures. High trust in government also increases citizens' willingness to comply with these measures. The aim of this study is to examine the 'rally-'round-the-flag' effect in the Czech Republic, analyse the characteristics related to the increase in trust in government, and test the relationship between trust in government and compliance with anti-pandemic measures. The analysis uses data from five waves of the Czech Household Panel Study (2016–2020) and finds a dramatic increase in trust in government in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A relatively higher increase in trust in government was observed among people with a low level of education and low social trust. Overall, however, the rise in trust in government is more of a general tendency across society than it is an increase in one specific group of the population. Trust in government is also linked to compliance with anti-pandemic measures.
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Dla zachodnich Europejczyków wojna dotyczy tylko Ukrainy. W tej optyce Putinowi chodzi o zajęcie sąsiedniego kraju i eksploatację jego zasobów. W naszej części Europy dominuje opinia, że chodzi nie tylko o Ukrainę, że to proces ciągłego rozszerzania rosyjskiego imperium.
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The aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of election victory in the Republic of Croatia. The main hypothesis of the paper is that in the Republic of Croatia the events of the 1990s, i.e., the Homeland War, had a stronger impact on the winners of the parliamentary elections in terms of the economic performance of the local self-government units (LSGs). Due to the availability of data, we focus on the 2016 parliamentary elections, and we model the victory of the two leading parties in Croatia – the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – at the level of LSG. We develop a logistic regression model with the variable "election victory" at the LSG level as a dependent variable explained by the following variables: economic development at the LSG level, Homeland War covered LSGs, transparency of LSG budgets, election turnout, and government budget support to the LSGs. The results show that certain commonly accepted opinions, such as that voters in more economically developed LSGs vote more for the SDP on average, and that voters in war-affected LSGs vote more for the HDZ on average, have empirical confirmation.
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Review of: Gabriela Kišiček, Homo Politicus: Political Rhetoric in Theory and Practice, Zagreb: Naklada Jesenski i Turk, 2021 (Drohobych: Tiskara Kolo) ISBN 9789532229158, 184 pages
More...Implementation of European Semester recommendations in the Visegrad countries
This paper examines the extent to which Visegrad countries take into account country-specific recommendations received within the framework of the European Semester, and the level of implementation experienced in the region as compared to that in the European Union. Based on a database created by using assessments of the European Commission’s annual country reports, we discuss not only the national-level implementation of recommendations within a term of one year, but also their long-term implementation. According to the annual assessments, the four Visegrad countries all belong to the second half of the field for the EU as a whole, with slightly below ‘some progress’ achieved in implementing recommendations. However, the impact of EU recommendations on the public policy decisions of Member States is much greater in the longer term than annual assessments can show. Important proof of this statement is that, over a multi-annual period, the Orbán government took measures addressing nearly two-thirds of EU recommendations, which were assessed as at least ‘some progress’ by the European Commission. In overall terms, this study demonstrates that European integration can make an impact on Member States not only through hard, binding instruments and exclusive powers, but also in a softer way, through public policy coordination.
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