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.
Project publications (total 4, displaying 1 - 4)
This monograph explores public and elite opinion toward events associated with the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. This investigation is based on an analysis of a unique collection of aggregate and individual level survey datasets. The central goal of this study is to illustrate how the survey evidence from the 1967 to 1969 period may increase understanding of the Prague Spring era.
The text is a regular contribution into the publication called Data Yearbook. It describes political changes in the Czech republic during the year 2008. The article focuses on such problems as government formation, changes in the government, election of the president and regional and Senate elections, and on the main issues of the Czech politics.
This study has two main aims. First, it explores the two main methods used in the Czech Republic to operationalize the concept of party identification. Second this study demonstrates the merits of both methods. Using the Czech Election Study of 2002 this research shows that estimates of partisanship are influenced by how the survey question is formulated. Thereafter, the relationship between the two main variants used in the Czech Republic is presented.
The central empirical puzzle addressed in this book is why are Czech citizens’ attitudes towards key facets of democracy so similar under socialist democracy in 1968 and liberal democracy in 2008? Examining unique survey datasets from the late 1960s and 2008 this book reveals that Czech and Slovak citizens’ political attitudes can justifiably be characterised in terms of stability.
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