Journal Czech Society Archive

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.

The degree of party polarization is a significant analytical measure contributing to our understanding of the party system development and it’s dynamic in time. It influences the government formation and indirectly also its stability. Moreover, the party polarization affects electoral choice and thus the voter decision-making process. Despite these it has been wrongfully neglected in the Czech political science literature so far. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap and present empirically backed data on the intensity and change of the party polarization in the Czech Republic. The analysis is based on the data sets of CVVM which monthly records the voter self-placement on the left-right scale in the long term. By analysing these data and using Dalton's index of party system polarization it is proved that party polarization in the Czech Republic has generally increased since 1993 and that it was usually higher during General election campaign. Within the period under review (1993-2013) the polarization index reached its lowest value in 2001, while the highest value was found in June 2010.

The paper analyses the fact that the Czech communist party (KSČM) can rely on substantial and stable (occasionally even rising) electoral support. The phenomenon has been discussed extensively in academic as well as social and political discourses. On the basis of available empirical data, sociological analyses and statistical information, the paper categorizes some basic socio-political conditions and predispositions which may help explain the fact that the political party once considered to be the anti-system heir of the non-democratic regime is now one of the most stable elements of Czech politics.

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

Political, financial and legislative support of one's own constituency or home location belongs to the main interests of politicians. The paper attempts to identify a spatial pattern in pork barrel grants allocated during the endorsement of draft state budgets by the Chamber of Deputies. The factor of deputies' home locations is analysed. Correlation analysis at district level exploits Parliamentary Gazette data on approved deputies' amendments to the draft state budget and a list of deputies' home municipalities from electoral database of the Czech Statistical Office. At municipal level, a local indicator of spatial autocorrelation was employed to discover several spatial clusters of high and low pork barrel support, which was compared with deputies' home locations. Although several pork barrel grants were allocated to these locations, no general correlation was confirmed.

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This paper is focused on changing rates of church affiliation and church attendance in the course of intergenerational and intragenerational transmission on the cases of four post-communist countries of central Europe: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. It is a generally accepted fact that the rates of traditional forms of religiosity in the Czech society declined continuously during the second half of the 20th century, while such an enormous decline was not indicated in other post-communist countries of Central Europe. These differences and their causes are main question for this analytical work. Contemporary religiosity is dependent on rates of its reproduction between generations. Inter- and intragenerational transmission was influenced by two basic factors: First, by an anti-religious policy, which varied between the communist regimes, and second by the resistance of some people and families against that concrete anti-religious policy. The rapid secularisation of Czech society was due to those two factors.

The Czech Republic and its predecessor, Czechoslovakia, have a long-term tradition of immunization programmes, with a current coverage rate of 98–99%. Vaccination is mandated by law to all individuals living in the territory of the Czech Republic. In legal terms, a person who refuses to have their child vaccinated commits an administrative offence against public health. While many experts consider immunization as one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, some members of Czech society do not regard compulsory vaccination as a clearly positive phenomenon.

From time to time all European countries, including the Czech Republic, experience debates about legitimacy of death penalty. Such debates are not incidental. The most serious crimes – violent crimes including the most serious ones - murders – have naturally always stood in the centre of attention of the media. Every time, when the Czech public is shaken by a brutal murder, a question repeatedly comes forth: Shouldn’t death penalty be restored again? Politicians, lawyers, journalists as well as wide public again and again enter the exciting debate, but the result is known beforehand: death penalty is prohibited by constitution and by international commitments of the Czech Republic.

This year sixty years have passed since the end of the Second World War and since the liberation of our country from German occupation. In connection with this anniversary, number of events, articles, television and radio programmes commemorated and discussed the war events, key military operations, antifascist movement, etc. How does the Czech public see this difficult period of history (which so significantly affected, apart from other things, the development of the second half of the 20th century in our country and elsewhere) six decades later? What do people know about it? The results of a survey executed by the Centre of Public Opinion Research (CVVM) of the Sociological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in November 2004 within a regular continuous survey, which included questions dealing with the Second World War and the Czechoslovak antifascist movement, can give us at least a partial answer.

For the last few years, comparable public polls dealing with different topics have been carried out in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland within the international cooperation based on CEORG. These countries were occasionally joined by other states from Central, Eastern or South Eastern Europe. These more or less regularly repeated polls include questions asking about the country’s economic situation and household living conditions.

Work, considering mainly work in the form of a paid job, places an important position in the life of every man. Work has its importance not only for the individual, who spends more than one quarter of every day of his productive life working, but also for the society. Although there have been changes in the meaning and the role of work in today’s society [see Mareš 2004], the majority of people consider work as a commonplace part of their life.

Recently we have voted for the accession of our country to the European Union. One section of the agreement about our accession concerns certain transitory periods, which refer, apart from other things, to the so-called free movement of workers. In countries that will put these transitory periods into effect Czech citizens will still be allowed to work only with a work permit. Some member states declared already in advance that they would fully liberate their labour market immediately after the accession of the Czech Republic to the EU, namely Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland.

Unemployment undoubtedly belongs among the most significant phenomena as well as the problems of the modern world. First of all, it has a number of negative socio-economic consequences, both for directly affected individuals, their families, households, and their environment, which is affected, among others, by reduced purchasing power of the unemployed, and for the whole society, which has to bear both the direct and the indirect costs connected with unemployment and with the struggle to overcome it.

The so-called opposition agreement was concluded by the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) and the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) after the Chamber of Deputies elections of 1998. It paved the way for a ČSSD minority government in 1998–2002. To present day, it continues to represent one of the most contested moments of the country’s post-communist political history. Both general awareness and the publicist discourse are dominated by a categorically negative, accusatory evaluation of the agreement as a deviation from the democratic framework, a catalyst of systemic corruption and clientelism, and a source of deep scepticism and political disaffection in the Czech general public.While scholarly literature also features strongly critical attitudes to the opposition agreement, there have been a number of works which compared it to the ways minority governments were formed and operated in other countries or which studied the circumstances of its formation and how the situation evolved. Such works have argued that the opposition agreement was a relatively standard case of minority government with under-developed institutional support.

The goal of the text is to analyze concordance between one’s religion and a close relative’s estimation thereof. To establish the accuracy of parents’ estimates of their children’s religion and vice versa, we ask the following question: what is the concordance of post-socialization beliefs about (un)successful transmission of religiosity between direct actors (parent/child)? We argue that the reliability of that estimate indicates the effectiveness of religious socialization. Socialization is not treated as a nonproblematic one-way process, but rather as a result of repeated mutual parent-child interactions and a host of other intervening factors (secondary socialization etc.) In this context, the level of estimate reliability is treated as an indicator of religious socialization and of the continuity of religious memory within family, which is viewed as a collective phenomenon. In other words, by imprinting values into one’s memory and worldview, the process of religious socialization shapes the ways one views the world and him/herself as well as the focus of his/her attention, or what is stored in his/her memory. Our project is conceptualized at an intersection of the theories of socialization and religious memory. Among the latter, we primarily rely on Jan Assmann’s conceptualization of memory. While many contemporary authors deal with issues of religious socialization, and some even with its links to memory, no investigations thus far have attempted to verify intergenerational transmission in terms of the reliability of mutual estimation of (non)religiousness between generations.

The article strives to contribute to the debate on the concept of corporate social responsibility by focusing on the under-researched area of the effects of firms’ grants on local and regional development from the perspective of local governments and inhabitants. This concept is typically studied from the corporate perspective. While normally ignored, the spatial dimension plays a substantial role in firms’ grant allocation decisions. The article tries to fill the gap by studying the case of spatial distribution of financial grants of the ČEZ Corporation to communities in the vicinity of the Dukovany nuclear plant, which is located at the peripheral border of the regions of Vysočina and South Moravia. The considerable amounts of money sent to local budgets are intended to compensate communities near the nuclear plant for the risks related to its existence.

Based on data from three group interviews conducted with groups of “workers” and “professionals”, this article focuses on ways that interviews participants choose in their attempts to cope with sociologists’ demands to describe social structure of the contemporary Czech society. The key category adopted from the interviewers’ questions around which the arguments of participants were centered is the category of “success“. The author analyses measures of success mentioned by participants, its presuppositions, who is regarded as successful by them and which criteria of success they adopt. Also analyzed is the self-positioning of the interview participants and the social group they identify with in the notions of social structure presented by them in the course of the interviews. 
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This paper deals with results of a special survey focused on the problem (issue) of historical consciousness of Communist Party voters. The opening part of the article presents a theoretical and methodological framework: there is introduced an operationalization of concepts such as collective memory, historical consciousness, collective identity, and also outlined the position of the Communist Party in the Czech post-communist political system. The empirical part of the text is devoted to the problems of Czech modern history, particularly to the way in which Communist Party electorate in different contexts assesses various historical periods or phenomena prior to 1989 and also how a subsequent systemic change is reflected. 
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The article deals with situation, attitudes and behaviour of members of Prague's Russian immigrant community. At the beginning an overview of recent socio-economic development in Russia, existing findings about Russian minority in the Czech Republic and Czech citizens’ attitudes towards Russians are presented. The core of the article is presentation of main results of a survey conducted by the author in spring 2010 among members of Russian community that live in Prague and its surroundings. Among the main hypotheses that came out of the survey is growth of importance of positive motivations to migrate, extension of geographical and social basis from which migrants come, continuity of self-isolation of the community combined with strong ties to the country of origin and rise of Russian ethnic economy in Prague.

The article stands as the fourth part of a series about the question answering process during standardized surveys and elaborates the phase of editing the response. Major moments and processes are explained that affect the shape of final answer at this stage and the narrow relationship of these facts to the nature and quality of survey data is pointed out. Step by step those phenomenons like rounding of numerical answers, the effect of answering scales in terms of its range, frequency, polarity or response order are elaborated and facts like response styles, range-frequency effect or positivity bias are mentioned.

The article of a mostly empirical character is drawn from archive data, from the sources of the Centre for Public Opinion Research, and from the first phase of the undertaking of a project of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic entitled "The Sociological Research of the Historical Consciousness of Inhabitants of the Czech Republic". The theoretical part of the text is based on the concept of collective memory, especially on the idea of the selectivity and changeability of contents saved in the memory. This article also presents quantitative data concerning the perspective held by public opinion on Czech history, and qualitative perspectives on historical consciousness attained through the use of focus groups.

This article examines the relationship between voter turnout (or, precisely, turnout intention) and variables related to the perception of the election campaign in the broader context of the other types of variables such as basic socio-demographic or political characteristics. The data used in this analysis are from surveys conducted during the period of three month before elections in 2010. All of the surveys were designed as public opinion polls and approximately 1000 Czech adults were interviewed nationwide at the beginning of each month. To explain the relationship between voter turnout (or rather a kind of readiness to vote) and the perception of the campaign, the binary logistic regression was chosen and three models were created. In relation to voter turnout, in addition to basic socio-demographic characteristics, the variables related to the perception of the election campaign are statistically significant, too. In the extended model, however, it is showed that behind the effects of most of them stands the rate of interest in politics. The only variable, which draws on a basis other than the interest in politics, proved to be awareness and acceptance of campaign influence on own voting behaviour. The frequency of consumption of media content proved to be more important than age, education and living standards. However, again behind these variables stands the interest in politics. Therefore, the interest in politics appears to be essential in relation to voter turnout in our analysis.

The article deals with cross-border cooperation which has become since the 1990´s an indelible element of the regional development of the Czech borderland areas. The paper presents the results of a research focusing on the positions of the Czech inhabitants living on the borderland of the Czech Republic and the cross-border cooperation issues. The research carried out in 2008 by the Public Opinion Research Centre (CVVM) showed that the inhabitants of the Czech Republic perceive the image of the borderland areas not as negatively as can be seen from previous studies on the same topic.

Wawrosz, Petr; Herbert Heissler. „Vybrané bariéry investic do lidského kapitálu.“ Naše společnost 11 (1): 36-46, http://dx.doi.org/10.13060/1214-438X.2013.11.1.4

If investments into human capital (HC) are as convenient as theory says why some people do not invest in the development of their HC and why other people with resources do not stimulate people without HC to invest including lending money for such investments? The paper tries to answer the question by identifying selected barriers causing lenders do not give money (resources) to the investments and potential borrowers are not willing to borrow them. From our point of view statistical discrimination and phenomena described as “acting-white” in the case of Afro-American community belong among the most important barriers, although they are not mentioned so often. The paper deals with both of the barriers and suggests how to solve them.