Search

Post-communist realities have made it necessary for the media in East Central Europe to redefine their role. Yet politicians and journalists in the region hold a wide range of views about what that role should be. Although united for over fifty years, the newly independent Czech and Slovak republics have inherited significantly different economic and political conditions, which have contributed to differences in their respective press systems and to the development of very different relationships between the government and media. Yet despite divergent views on the media's role, media policy in both countries will be increasingly determined by economic factors. The following paper examines these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption is one of the major social and economic problems in the Czech Republic as evidenced by numerous opinion polls among both the business community and the general public. In survey questionnaires, citizens regularly refer to corruption as one of the most substantial issues. Th is paper focuses, however, on how corruption is perceived by elected representatives, meaning both regional and local politicians. Th e data is based on survey which was part of an international research project which collected data from councilors in towns with more than 10,000 citizens, then on research we had conducted amongst 83 mayors of the Hradec Kralove Region in February 2017. We also draw on data from the Czech Social Science Data Archive that employs them from various surveys of the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and works within the NESSTAR analytical platform. Th is paper explores assumptions concerning elected local representatives and their perceptions of corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to show what effects Europeanization has had on the pro-life movement in the Czech Republic. The first section of the text outlines a multifaceted concept of institutional theory based on historical institutionalist ideas. Next, it looks at one specific institutional process, Europeanization, informed by the work of Radaelli as well as della Porta's and Caiani's work on mobilization in the European Union. The following section defines the relevant actors in the Czech pro-life movement. Finally, the paper applies this concept of Europeanization of social movements to the Czech pro-life case. The paper concludes with observations that Europeanization of the Czech pro-life movement is uneven, manifesting itself among some actors, though not all, and in some areas of Europeanization. Charitable organizations as well as one highly visible activist group are highly associated with processes of Europeanization; on the other hand, in most cases, other activist groups in the pro-life movement in the Czech Republic are more highly influenced by more general trends in interest-group internationalization. These insights may pave the way for additional research on trends both of the European pro-life movement as a whole, as well as serving as a touchstone for improving such theoretical concepts as "Europeanization" vis-à-vis "globalization" or "European integration". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the European dimension of the competition and contention between Czech political parties and argues that domestic party interests undermine the formal oversight of EU politics by the Czech national parliament. Within the current institutional arrangements, national political parties assume stances - which are expressed through voting - towards the European Union (and European integration as such) as they act in the arena of national parliaments that are supposed to make the EU more accountable in its activities. Based on an analysis of roll-calls, the paper focuses on the ways the political parties assume their stances towards the EU and how the parties check this act by voting on EU affairs. The paper examines factors that should shape parties' behaviour (programmes, positions in the party system, and public importance of EU/European integration issues). It also focuses on party expertise in EU/European issues and asserts that EU/European integration issues are of greater importance in extra-parliamentary party competition than inside the parliament, suggesting a democratic disconnect between voters and parliamentary behaviour. The study's empirical analysis of the voting behaviour of Czech MPs also shows that the parliamentary scrutiny introduced by the Lisbon Treaty is undermined by party interests within the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

After the 1998 general elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic, the largest party, the Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), formed a minority government. The origin and existence of this government was enabled by an agreement with the second largest formation, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS). What was then known as the Opposition Agreement became the subject of considerable debate. The paper analyses the Opposition Agreement in comparison with other minority governments with external support, be they governments formed on the basis of ad hoc agreements or complex ones. The text looks in detail at government practice in Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, and Italy at the time of the Historic Compromise; this is then used as a context for outlining the specifics of the Czech case. The paper highlights not only the Opposition Agreement between the Social Democrats and the Civic Democratic Party and the later Toleration Patent, which even deepened the cooperation between these two parties, but also the frequent ad hoc legislative coalitions which the minority government was able to form. An additional aim of the paper is to outline foreign analogies to the potential future single-party minority government of the Czech Social Democrats supported by the Communists. Because of its considerable length, the text is divided into two parts; the first part is printed in this volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volatility Research and Party System Changes in the 2010 Czech Elections to the Chamber of Deputies. The paper deals with the volatility scores in the Chamber of Deputies elections in the Czech Republic, calculated both for the national and regional (e.g. level of the electoral constituencies) levels. The main aim of the paper is to identify the link between gains and losses of the parties in the respective region with the volatility in this region. In case of the change of volatility calculated for the 2010 and 2006 elections, a distinctive increase of volatility is identified, although the comparison shows that the increase in volatility occurred mostly in the same regions in both elections. Volatility on the regional level is strongly connected to the losses of the parties which formed the previous government (in office 2006-2009) and to the gains of the strongest new party, TOP09. Also, three comparative calculations of volatility have been made with respect to the presence of "other" parties. We then suggest it would be a mistake to calculate volatility while omitting the category of "other" parties in the numerator, without also removing it from the denominator. In case of the remaining two types of calculation ("other" parties calculated as one bloc, and "other" parties omitted both in both the numerator and the denominator), further analyses might be required. [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]

Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists' discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite countermovement support for their efforts to obstruct challenges. Using a range of data sources, we delineate the mechanisms used by these elite actors to vilify and stigmatize environmental activists, paving the way for more violent forms of public harassment. The concept we initiate, discursive obstruction, adds the critical dimension of power relations to analyses of both framing processes and discursive opportunity structures. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for social movement research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

In this paper we provide a synopsis of our research on dialogical networks in media (Leudar 1998; Leudar and Nekvapil 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 2002a, 2002b, Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil 2004, Nekvapil and Leudar in press). We outline the concept, provide an example of analysis with that concept, and summarize constitutive properties of these networks. The analysis uses materials from both Czech and British newspaper articles and television debates, all of which relate to politically sensitive events. The Czech materials in particular concern inter-ethnic problems which were acute between 1992–1995, first in the now dissolved Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volatile and unstable party systems in East Central Europe are associated with the emergence of new parties. However, some such new parties survive and become part of the party system they entered while other newcomers fade away even after they record major electoral success or gain government participation. How can we explain the contrasting fortunes of new parties? What explains their persistence and organizational survival? In this paper, we try to find the answers to these questions by linking the organizational success of new parties to the composition of their elites. We suggest that the similarity in professional and career backgrounds contributes to par ties' organizational success by increasing party cohesion, especially at the level of party leadership. We demonstrate our arguments on three new Czech parties - Public Affairs (W), Dawn of Direct Democracy (Dawn) and ANO - with contrasting political and organizational fortunes. Using data on elites' career and political pasts we show that, unlike ANO, W and Dawn have comparatively more heterogeneous elite circles which, we suggest, make them more vulnerable to internal conflicts. [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]

Business-firm parties founded on the initiative of a political entrepreneur are a phenomenon of growing importance in contemporary party politics. In practice, these are either commercial companies, whose structure is used for a political project, or new and separate organisations constructed on business principles. This article examines the case of Czech party ANO (“YES”), established by the owner of the Agrofert holding company Andrej Babiš. The party achieved remarkable success in the 2013 Czech general election. The opportunity for ANO’s success was provided by strong voter dissatisfaction, reinforced by the scandalous circumstances of the centre-right government’s fall. This context created a fertile ground for the introduction of a new entity espousing anti-party, anti-corruption, and anti-political sentiments. In ANO’s organisation and functioning, a strengthening of certain traits characteristic of this type of parties is apparent. A robust system for screening party members and representatives has been gradually put into place, and human resources–style techniques of psychological testing were employed at the party’s inception. Furthermore, the power in the party has been wholly centralised around the leader, and the party’s territorial structures assigned merely service tasks. ANO has also maximised its electoral-professional orientation. The strengthening of the typical traits of a business-firm party can be explained by reference to the party’s origin in the business environment and the notions entertained by its leader. In many respects, Babiš’s party has brought the organisational model of a business-firm party to its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations into Central Europe’s emerging party–state relationships—in contrast to those of the former Soviet Union—have focused less on the abuse of public office for private gain and more on patronage and clientelism as political resources. That debate in turn has been bounded by the conventional political science preoccupation with civil society, party, and state relations. This article contends that these conventions have tended to deflect our attention from the contemporary dynamics of political corruption in Central Europe, in which the commercial sector is a major player and the gains of political players primarily private. Building on the assumption that party systemic adaptations are contingent on changing power relations within the political economy, this article offers an ideal typical party model to characterise the behaviour of political parties that preside over the continuous marketization of the state. A “corporate brokerage party” directs its strategic focus to the private sector and acts primarily as a broker of the state’s power in the marketplace, whether expressed through privatisation, regulation, or public procurement. Using the Czech Republic as a critical case study for Central Europe, the evidence suggests that politicians able to direct allocation to the private sector with low regulatory constraints act less evidently as technocratic brokers of the public interest, partisan constituency, or organisation builders and more as private agents. [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]

This article reports the findings of research on school culture in post-totalitarian society in the Czech Republic. The research explored restructuralisation and reculturalisation in the Czech school education system through analysis of school culture in one school located in a midsized town in the central part of the country. In-depth biographical interviews were carried out with teachers who taught in the school before and after 1989, the year of the fall of communism in the Czech Republic. The article offers a detailed description of how the totalitarian regime used teachers as its servants. At the same time, it offers an analysis of the changes that were provoked by the political transformation, and how teachers reacted to them. The research also reflects aspects of change in the country as a whole as it underwent dynamic development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The presented article tries to make sense of Václav Havel, a man of many qualities and professions yet not a professional in the conventional sense of the word. The aim is to offer deeper insight into diverse cognitive elements which formed Havel's political reasoning and attitudes. The idea is to provide an alternative interpretation and get beyond the customary explanations expressed through traditional IR language seeing Havel as a dissident idealist who was pushed by some realist impulses to clearly define real political and later also geopolitical stands. In doing so, the article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses conceptual frameworks (rather than a single framework) within which Have saw and understood the political world. The middle part examines Havel's political agenda, namely the issues of the return to Europe, the German question, and relationships with Russia, the United States and toward multilateral institutions. The final part that utilizes primary data obtained through personal interviews with many Havel's close col-laborators presents two faces of Václav Havel: the dramatist and the ideologue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory of parliamentary regimes presumes that parliament can express vote of no confi- dence in government. On the other hand executive power (government or head of state) is endowed with right to dissolve the parliament However, these "doomsday devices" are not in balance in many parliamentary regimes, including the Czech Republic. On the basis of a comparative analysis of dissolution provisions in the constitutions of European states the article argues that the government in the Czech Republic should be given the right to dissolve the lower chamber at least in case that the latter expresses vote of no confidence in the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the dissolution of the extreme right Workers’ Party by the Czech courts in 2010. It situates the case in the historical development of party closures by militant democracy on Czech territory and explains why the Workers’ Party was the first party to be dissolved in the Czech Republic after the fall of the Communist regime. It also describes the legislative framework in contemporary Czech law for the dissolution of political parties. It details the political and legal repercussions of the ruling and the wider discussions it provoked, not only in political and expert circles but also among the general public. Given the fact that the case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the European dimension of the dissolution of the Workers’ Party is also analysed. [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 describes the extreme right in the Czech Republic, where, in contrast to several other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, this part of the political spectrum has been unsuccessful for the past ten years. The aim of this article is to analyse the position of the extreme right in the Czech party system and the internal ideological and strategic cleavages within the extreme right. The conclusion of this article is that organized party-political extremism is after two decades of modern political development only a marginal part of the Czech political spectrum, with many internal problems and without real chances of significant success in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development towards a ‘Europe of the Regions’ is accompanied by a complex system of cooperation and interdependence between the different levels of policy-making. In this article, we ask how European integration affects the party composition of regional governments. We argue that the European Union (EU) classification system of regions — the ‘Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics’ (NUTS) — establishes incentives to form similar coalition governments among regions that belong to the same NUTS area. We test our argument by analysing government formation in the Czech regions and thus in one EU member state whose regions benefit financially from EU structural policy. The results show that there is empirical evidence to support our main hypotheses: even when controlling for variables that reflect standard coalition theories and for patterns of party competition in the national sphere, we find that coalitions are more likely to form if the respective parties are also part of the government in the regions that belong to the same NUTS area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2010 Senate Elections and Voter Shifts between the First and Second Rounds. The article concerns elections to the Senate of the Czech Parliament. Primarily, it refers to potential shifts of voter preference between the first and second rounds of the Senate elections. The fundamental tool for determining this trend is the Bayesian ecological inference model, through the use of which the authors attempt to answer the question of how the voters from the first round voted in the second round one week later when the options were reduced to only two candidates. The text analyzes these processes in detail in five electoral districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 analyzes perceptions of inter-governmental fiscal relations as held by local officials of the Czech Republic. The field study probes local perceptions of progress toward fiscal decentralization in the Czech Republic. A statistical analysis is based on a scaling of cities according to size and according to a generalized, multi-part measure of fiscal autonomy. This measure is effective in discriminating high and low autonomy cities by size, types of expenditures, and funding sources. Cities of diverse sizes are divided into groups reflecting perceptions of greater or lesser autonomy. The implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a series of papers on the political situation in the Czech Republic as of July 2006. An article deals with the decline in the popularity of the Czech communist party after the parliamentary elections. Political analyst Jiri Pehe argues that the inclusion within the democratic process is the only way to transform this party towards modernity.

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.

This article examines the effect that different policy interventions of transitional justice have on the desires of the victims of human rights violations for retribution. The retributive desires assessed in this article are conceptualized as individual, collective, and abstract demands for the imposition of a commensurate degree of suffering upon the offender. We suggest a plausible way of reducing victims’ retributive desires. Instead of “getting even” in relation to the suffering, victims and perpetrators may “get equal” in relation to their respective statuses, which were affected by political crimes. The article hypothesizes that the three classes of transitional justice: (1) reparation that empowers victims by financial compensation, truth telling, and social acknowledgment; (2) retribution that inflicts punishment upon perpetrators; and (3) reconciliation that renews civic relationship between victims and perpetrators through personal contact, apology, and forgiveness; each contributes to restoring equality between victims and perpetrators, and in so doing decreases the desires that victims have for retribution. In order to test our hypotheses, we conducted a survey of former political prisoners in the Czech Republic. Results from the regression analysis reveal that financial compensation, social acknowledgement, punishment, and forgiveness are likely to reduce victims’ retributive desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes and compares Czech and Slovak party politics after 1989. The concept of cleavages is used as a theoretical starting point. The authors point out that although the communist period overshadowed the traditional cleavages dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, it is possible to analyze some politically-based cleavages in the respective party arrangements of the two countries. The main conclusion of the article is as follows: that despite differing trajectories of political development during the 1990s, at the present time, both the Czech and Slovak party systems show great similarities in terms of the prevalence of the socioeconomic cleavage. Socioeconomic cleavage emerged quite early after 1989 in the Czech Republic; in Slovakia the socioeconomic cleavage has become dominant only in recent years. This has contributed to the stabilization of the classic left-right model of political competition and the consolidation of the two countries' party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at models of judicial administration as well as the independence of the judiciary. A comparison is made between the Czech Republic's executive model and the Romanian model of self-management. The Rule of Law is noted as a necessary condition for social, economic, and political development in countries transitioning to democracy from authoritarianism. The organization of the judiciary and the consolidation of democracy is found to be reciprocal in nature. Judiciary organization is necessary for the oversight of the executive branch and legislative transparency.

The article looks at politics in the Czech Republic in 2004. A chart is presented which compares the number of seats in the European Parliament held by various political parties following the election of June 11-12, 2004, including the Czech Social Democratic Party, the Civic Democratic Party, and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. The author also offers a list of members of the cabinet of Prime Minister Stanislav Gross, including Minister of Finance Bohuslav Sobotka, Minister of Foreign Affairs Cyril Svoboda, and Minister of Culture Pavel Dostál.

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.

The article focuses on the democratization efforts of the post-communist European states, Czech Republic and Slovakia, and examines the factors that are obstructing the development of democratic national security systems. The lack of expert personnel for the suggested scheme of civil-military relation in a democratic state and a process for coordinating the existed national security expertise, are hindering the progress of the states towards democratic national security system. Challenges faced by post-communist militaries include various societal and military values, the structural and ideological reforms of their forces and others.