Political Sociology

The department focuses on the systematic study of the basic processes in the democratic political system of the CzechRepublic and some of its bodies. The main subjects of research are the emergence and stabilisation of a system of parties, deputies and senators in the Parliament of the Czech Republic, the impact of the non-political representation of interests in the area of work and capital (social dialogue), civil society and the relationship between civil society, political parties and the state.

Main topics:

• political parties and party system
• MPs and senators
• elections and electoral behavior
• political attitudes
• civil society and the relation between civil society, political parties and the state

Contact: tel.: +420 210 310 563, +420 210 310 237, e-mail: politika@soc.cas.cz

Some of the current projects:

Dynamics of change in Czech society (This project will examine the process of change in contemporary Czech society by carrying out four waves of a household panel survey. The core themes of the research are family life, education and the labour market, social stratification, housing choices and inequalities and political participation. Principal investigator: Pat Lyons, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.)

Protestors in Context: An Integrated and Comparative Analysis of democratic citizenship in the Czech Republic II. (This project will field Czech waves of two international survey research programme: 'Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation' in 2013, and the ISSP 'Citizenship module' in 2014. This research will show what differentiates general and protesting citizens in terms of attitudes and behaviour. It will also demonstrate the importance of context for understanding general and protesting citizens' constellation of beliefs and level of activism. Principal investigator: Pat Lyons, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.)

SECONOMICS - Socio-Economics meets Security (The goal of SOCONOMICS is to synthesize sociological, economic and security science into a usable, concrete, actionable knowledge for policy makers and social planners responsible for citizen's security. The project is driven by industry case studies and will specifically identify security threats in transport (air, urban and super urban metro) and critical infrastructure. The contribution of the project will be in developing and furthering the state of the art in modelling security problems in a technological and socio economic context and then applying state of the art risk assessments and analysis of the social context to develop optimal policies. Principal investigator: PhDr. Zdenka Mansfeldová, CSc.)