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This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the distribution of public money and its political and societal implications. Drawing on evidence from central and eastern Europe, it offers an innovative insight into public responses to various strategies of public spending. Given that public expenditures are funded mainly from tax revenues, it also assesses public attitudes to politically motivated allocations of funds. The book seeks to identify how people evaluate the material benefits of funding in light of the fairness - or lack thereof - of the distribution process, whether popular acceptance of variations in public spending depends on the framing of the beneficiaries, and the implications of money allocation for political trust in political institutions.

How do citizens form their political attitudes? How do political actors influence people's political views in their everyday lives? Do people's feelings towards political parties and politicians influence the public opinion? The book presents a series of laboratory experiments focused on the formation processes of citizens'attitudes to political issues in the context of their emotional attachments to political actors. The research puts emphasis on negativity and negative feelings of citizens towards political actors and shows that this type of negative attachment influences the way people think about political issues. Since the experimental method is a newcomer in the field of Czech political science, the volume's ambition is also to introduce experiments as a relevant and useful tool for extending knowledge of substantial political processes and phenomena.