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The quality of democracy depends on both politicians and citizens. While most attention has focused on politicians, this paper looks at citizens. There has been some scepticism about whether the postcommunist public is prepared to rule their countries. The legacies of communism and the rigours of the transition may have produced citizens whose opinions are unstable and ill-informed and therefore a poor basis for democratic policy making. This paper tests this proposition by considering the nature of public opinion in the Czech Republic. Its main conclusion is that postcommunist public opinion is more reasonable than conventional wisdom suggests. Opinions on most policies change slowly if at all and when they do change the changes are prompted more by gradual shifts in mores than by political manipulation. This suggests that citizens in the region are prepared to have a significant voice in policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and contrasts the conservative right in both the Czech Republic and Poland in its historical and contemporary contexts. It argues that the conservative right is strong in both these countries and that they share many similar political features. However, there are also numerous differences between the conservative right in these nations. The reasons for these dissimilarities can be found in the relative historical social-economic development of the Czech Republic compared with Poland. Related to this is the fact that Czech society is a largely secular one, while the Catholic Church retains a strong social position in Poland. However, the paper also argues that it is possible to observe a convergence between the secular and religious forms of conservatism existent in the Czech Republic and Poland and that this is most evident at the level of European Union politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of EU integration on the foreign policy of the Czech Republic. It surveys Czech foreign policy since 1989, focusing on five distinct periods of the Czech Republic's relationship with the EU. The paper concludes that EU integration has had only a limited impact on Czech foreign policy in comparison to domestic political factors. EU membership also does not appear to have altered basic perceptions of Czech foreign policy interests, which remain largely determined by (pre-1989) historical experience and perceptions of geopolitical vulnerability. However, the Czech Republic has also sought to use the EU to achieve its key foreign policy goals, especially during its EU presidency in the first half of 2009, and EU membership has influenced the development of Czech policy towards Eastern Europe. In these regards, at least, Czech foreign policy can be said to have been 'EU-ised'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore how European dynamics and domestic legacies interact in generating a specific pattern of change at the domestic level. Specifically, I examine the different impacts of the European Union (EU) on the adoption of administrative reforms in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the 1990s and the early 2000s. I claim that the EU's influence on the reforms was mediated by the reformist legacies of preceding communist regimes in those countries. While the EU affected the reforms through the mechanism of anticipation in countries with strong reformist legacies, the influence of the EU flowed through the mechanism of conditionality in countries with weak reformist legacies. I illustrate my case through a comparative analysis of Hungary and the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the development of Czech innovation policy which started to get its shape in the first years of the 21st century. The article traces its origins to a number of interlinked factors - the introduction of European regional policy in the Czech Republic, the increased inflow of foreign direct investment into R&D-intensive sectors and also the devolution of power to Czech regions that were established in 2001 and gave a new, regional dimension to research and innovation policy. It pays particular attention to the process through which the regionally-based innovation policy advocated by the European Union (EU) has been translated and adapted in the context of a new EU member state. As an illustration of the efforts at the regional level to make a better use of the potential of R&D and innovation in the regional development, a case study of a regional innovation strategy of the City of Prague is analysed. The City of Prague was selected for a critical analysis of an innovation system and innovation policy due to the fact that it is a region with significant but until now not fully exploited innovation potential and, in addition, its first innovation strategy has been recently adopted. The innovation strategy is closely scrutinized and the process of its elaboration is critically examined within the European and especially national context. The authors demonstrate that there is a lot of conceptual ambiguity and confusion associated with the process of transferring the experiences of Western European regions to the Czech Republic. The authors believe that at least some of their observations and analysis of weaknesses of the process through which the regional innovation strategy (RIS) has been carried out will have relevance for other Czech regions and even for other regions in the new EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely argued that the pre-accession process of the Eastern enlargement affected political competition in Central and Eastern Europe. While such claims have been substantiated in general theoretical propositions, there is a lack of theoretically informed research attempting to explain how political competition was affected throughout the region. This article utilises Lijphart’s institutional typology to better understand how pre-accession processes shaped political competition under consensus democracies. The article shows that the consensually designed democracies of Poland and the Czech Republic were able to mitigate the negative impact of the pre-accession process through the rise of Eurosceptic parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Václav Havel had two eventful terms as the first democratic president of the Czech Republic. The documentary Citizen Havel is one rhetorical artifact that captures the way a new democracy and its attendant executive power is constructed consciously in real time in a political culture where such a tradition has largely not existed. Culled from ten years of fly-on-the-wall-style footage, Citizen Havel captures the tensions between the constitutional expectations of the Czech presidency and Havel's own extraconstitutional interpretations of executive power. Ultimately, this essay argues that Citizen Havel is one influential representation of how Czech “presidentiality” during the post-communist transition was built from the inventional resources of a range of rhetorical and historical materials, such as the Czechoslovakian interwar period, the long influence of totalitarianism and the dissident culture that challenged it, the examples of “Western” presidential rhetoric, and even European monarchical traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What impact does European Union (EU) funding of advocacy organizations have? To address this question our article turns to the post-communist Czech Republic, an ideal laboratory for studying externally dependent non-governmental organizations. Employing social network analysis, the main objective of this article is to analyse the effect of EU funding on the cooperation networks of Czech advocacy organizations. Our source of data is a survey of these organizations. We aim to figure out whether there is an association between the dependency of advocacy organizations on EU resources, and their cooperation with other organizations. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation based on the competition argument, our hypothesis is that the greater the dependency on EU funding, the greater the cooperation capacity on the part of advocacy organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the development of Czech adult education policy over the past twenty years. It comments on the fact that the processes of globalization and Europeanization represent the most significant factor of that policy. The introductory part presents the historical development from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the communist regime. The subsequent analysis of the impacts of globalization on Czech education policy emphasizes local manifestations of and connections to the ideas and trends that may be traced in the vast majority of nation states. Examples include the influence of international organizations on the education policies of individual countries through expert opinions and policy documents as well as the phenomenon of vocationalism. Regarding the specific features of the national example under analysis, the article applies a concept of glocalization that surpasses the view of globalization as mere unification. It shows that globalization and Europeanization are clearly reflected in Czech education policy, while revealing that various forms and connections of policy transfer also display nationally specific characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines political reforms made to the intelligence service of the Czech Republic following the partition of Czechoslovakia. The author evaluates the removal of Communists from the intelligence service and the service's focus on counterterrorism measures. The author describes the legislative framework formed by national security policymakers that shaped the operations of the intelligence service. Various organizational and leadership changes to various Czech intelligence agencies are described as well. The article also deals with themes of transparency, democratization, and information gathering.

This article reports on the 2010 Parliamentary elections in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The article discusses Czech political parties including the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) and the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), noting that the country holds the Presidency of the European Council. The article also discusses Slovakia's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) party. Information is provided on political corruption, election campaigns, and the mobilisation of voters as well.

This article is an empirical-theoretical mapping of the Czech participation in the peacebuilding reconstruction of Afghanistan in the form of the Czech Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). As will become clear, an important part of such a study is a focus on the analysis of the influence of the security context and external factors on the participation and form of the Czech PRT. The study is divided into two basic parts. The first part gives the reader a necessary and sensible grounding. Specifically, it presents a contextual frame for the participation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Afghanistan. What then follows is an analysis of the domestic political debate in the Czech Republic. One of the findings is that any proper domestic political debate was absent, instead there was a polarization of the relationship between the government of the Czech Republic and the parliamentary opposition on the issue of the Czech PRT Logar. The article concludes with a question concerning the motives of the Czech government for sending the Czech PRT into Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, through an examination of the discourse by the elites and public opinion, I discuss how the Czech Republic conceived of its place and security in the world in the first five years following its independence. In doing so, I argue that how the Czechs have collectively conceived of themselves had an impact on the strategic choices the Czech Republic had to make to adjust to international change resulting from the end of the Cold War, and on the type of armed forces it decided to develop. The emerging Czech security identity and strategic culture observed during that period indeed brought connections to policy choices, and as such made NATO membership a policy priority, and the development, within evolving financial constraints, of capable armed forces taking active part in Alliance activities the number one defense priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on scholarly accounts from the study of Western Europe which seek to explain national preference formation in European Union member states, this article explores the factors which shape the Czech Republic's policy preferences at the EU level. It argues that whilst ideology, dependency and powerful economic interest groups have explanatory power, the key to explaining national preference formation in the Czech case lies in vulnerabilities and (perceived) weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates whether Europe is united or remains divided concerning the concept of creating a new supranational political institution and deepened integration. The manner in which various European Union (EU) member states have gone through different processes of state formation, nation building, and democratization to develop different forms of national identity is discussed. It is argued that an examination of the relationship between national and European identities is essential to understand what shapes policy and what the limits of European integration are. The perception of national and European identities from the viewpoint of the political and economic elite of the Czech Republic are compared with new and old EU member states.

Explores changes in party competition and coalition-building patterns in the Czech Republic that underpinned its twin transition to democracy and a market economy in the 1990s and early 2000s. Domestic political landscape that underlined the Czech Republic's evolution from a communist state to a modernizing political economy under relatively benign global and regional conditions; Czech Republic's integration into the global economy.