Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

This project examines the nature of citizenship in the Czech Republic and the legacy of the Prague Spring 1968. In early May 1968 a mass survey undertaken for the communist party leadership investigated public attitudes toward democratisation in Czechoslovakia. This survey gives rare insight into (a) how communism hoped to reform itself, and (b) what were the political aspirations of citizens in an orthodox communist state. The goal of this research project is to examine this dataset and repeat this survey in the Czech Republic on the fortieth anniversary of the Prague Spring in 2008. In the 2008 survey there will be a replication of items asked in 1968 combined with measurements of perceptions and knowledge of the events of both 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Using a comparative methodology this project: (i) examines popular conceptions of citizenship under communism (1968) and under multiparty democracy (2008), (ii) explores the legacy of the Prague Spring in comparison to the Velvet Revolution and citizens knowledge of these events, and (iii) evaluates various models of citizenship and explores the degree to which attitudes toward citizenship in a post-communist state such as the Czech Republic differ from orientations observed in established democracies.