2013/2

The electronic version of the second number of the eleventh edition of the review Czech Society (Naše společnost). Czech Society issues Center for Public Opinion Research, Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

Jeřábek, Hynek, Jan Rössler, Pavel Sklenařík. 2013. „Mediální obraz Karla Schwarzenberga v tištěných denících před prezidentskými volbami 2013." Naše společnost 11 (2): 3-15,

The first direct presidential elections in the Czech Republic took place in January 2013. This event and the period before were extensively covered by media, which many candidates and political actors described as ultimately having a significant influence on voters’ decisions. This article focuses on an analysis of the media image of one of the presidential candidates, Karel Schwarzenberg. Originally an outsider, he reached the second round of the elections, but then he was beaten by Miloš Zeman. The article uses the theory of framing and specifies it to the circumstances of the first and second round of the elections. It applies a quantitative and qualitative content analysis to the main Czech daily newspapers and to the website supporting Schwarzenberg www.volimkarla.cz. The in-depth analysis reveals that the positive image of Karel Schwarzenberg created by his supporters before the first round of the elections was reframed before the second round into a rather negative image.

Červinková, Monika, Lucie Kulhavá. 2013. „Karel Schwarzenberg a Miloš Zeman: Pozitivní a negativní kampaň k prezidentským volbám." Naše společnost 11 (2): 16-29, 

The article discusses the official presentations of the two most successful candidates of the first round of the presidential elections in the Czech Republic 2013, Karel Schwarzenberg and Miloš Zeman, from the perspective of the concepts of positive and negative political advertisement and the reflection of the election campaigns by Czech citizens. By the means of the framework and content analyses the topics and the most frequent words of the official (created by campaigns teams) materials are identified. The results are interpreted with regard to the attributes of positive and negative campaign. Using the statistical analysis of the data from public opinion survey by CVVM the Czech public’s reflection of the election campaigns is described. The results of the study indicate that we can denote Zeman’s campaign after the first round of the elections as a negative one. Zeman’s campaign has also proved to be more specific and memorable - by both, subjective evaluation of the respondents and the associations, connected with the candidates after the elections.

Horák, Vít. 2013. „Kampaň před prvním kolem české prezidentské volby v roce 2013 z perspektivy Alexanderovy performativní teorie." Naše společnost 11 (2): 30-40,

The presented paper tries to interpret the campaign before the presidential election in Czech 2013 from the perspective of Jeffrey Alexander´s performative theory. It argues that the process of preference formation cannot be completely explained on the basis of rational interests of the voters, media or socioeconomic strata. On the contrary, the paper based in durkheimian paradigm argues for the importance of collective emotions. The campaign is understood here as a sequence of performative acts in which the candidates, understood as collective representations, try to associate themselves with emotions of the voters. The performance in Alexander’s perspective takes place in the civil sphere formed by the cultural code with binary structure of the democratic and antidemocratic side. In this perspective the case of Czech presidential campaign will be shown with the focus on the unexpected advancement of Karel Schwarzenberg to the second round of the election.

Karaščáková, Zuzana. 2013. „Prvá priama voľba prezidenta v Českej republike na Twitteri." Naše společnost 11 (2): 41-52,

This article examines the use of microblogging service Twitter during the period of presidential election 2013, in the Czech Republic and aims to contribute to a development of an emerging research field to which only a marginal interest of academics have been devoted so far, especially in the Czech Republic. A multi-method approach is used to analyze the dataset of tweets, which have contained predefined hashtags within a course of four weeks period – including both, the first and the second round of elections. The findings indicate that the debate on Twitter "copies" events in mainstream media (mainly presidential TV debate), while linking to information sources in posts does not necessarily lead to the official media sources. The analysis also reveals that tweets most often refer to Karel Schwarzenberg, in comparison with the names of other candidates, and that among the themes of tweets and retweets the most frequent topics are the campaign and political preferences which suggests the potential of Czech Twitter to form a basis of online political communication.

Červenka, Jan. 2013. „Ekonomika a veřejné mínění: Koresponduje subjektivní hodnocení s reálným vývojem?" Naše společnost 11 (2): 53-69,

The text discusses the relationship between real economic development, which is primarily measured by conventional statistical macroeconomic indicators, and the public opinion on economic development, whose regular monitoring offers a number of subjective indicators. Empirical data from the period of the independent Czech Republic show that subjective indicators reflect the real economic situation and its changes over time. In a broader sense the paper highlights some of the practical difficulties, which always arise when interpreting the results of public opinion polls and similar quantitative sociological investigations in this area.