Journal Our Society Archive

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 electronic version of the first number of the twelfth 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Interview with Josef Bečvář, researcher of the Institute for Public Opinion Research of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

Old age and aging of individuals are phenomenons that took important place in society as early as former times. During twentieth century the question of aging got new meaning, because it newly started to overreach from individual level to all-society. As a result of improvement of some social conditions (f.e. medical care, lifestyle, hygiene, living standard etc.), that was already initiated approximately at the beginning of the nineteenth century, dying started to be moved to higher age and people live longer. In modern societies this event usually goes with decline of natality and fertility. In final effect combination of these two factors causes the process that is known as demographic aging. In general we have to distinction between two views of problems of aging. The first view is focused on individual aging, the second one on demographic aging of human population. But it is clear that both of these views relate to each other. Similarly this article offers the roundup of problems of demographic aging, but also gives a touch of questions about longevity and quality of life, that gain ground in connection with theme of individual aging.

The aim of this article is to signify the profile of the Czech political parties from the point of view of their voters and with reference to some fundamental determinants of voting behaviour. Text tries to apply the theoretic bases and empirical research to the current Czech party system. Consequently, the author notices the social approach to the parties and party system functioning or more precisely to the social cleavage affecting the key individuals and identifying the formative processes of this system.

The article stands as a first part of a series about the question answering process during standardized surveys. The series conceptually draws on the Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology (CASM) and hence it maps primarily cognitive aspects of responding process. At the very beginning the interview situation itself is described and its interactional/communication, cognitive and formal components are defined. The answering process is in accord with prevailing theories described in the course of the question interpretation, memories retrieval, making the judgement and editing the answer. The first part of the whole series concentrates on the interpretation phase. The topic of question representation is elaborated thru the psychological conception of mental representation in detail and several examples show implications for survey quality. Schemas and scenarios are then described as an “at hand” tools for interpretation of the question, and these are again illustrated by some examples. In the end, priming is mentioned as another possible source of interpretation bias.

The text focuses on public opinion in Czech Republic and Poland relating to the plan of U.S. government to locate some parts of U.S. national missile defence in these countries. It describes and compares main shifts of developments of public attitudes in both countries to the project as well as to eventual referendum in this matter within the period up to the first half of 2007. The text shows main demographical, societal and political differences in both countries and discusses reasons and motives behind particular attitudes of Czech and Polish citizens.

The electronic version of the first number of the fifth 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.

The article compares the level of dependence of four justice ideologies on the structural position of an individual and his/her personal traits. First, the theoretical concept of distributive justice is introduced within the framework of Grid- Group Theory. Second, Czech public opinion of justice is analysed with data from the ISJP 2006 survey. Egalitarianism is the most structurally embedded ideology that is infl uenced by all socio-demographic attributes. Nevertheless, psychological factors aff ect the other ideologies to some extent. Ascriptivism is more characteristic of extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; individualism of openness to experience; fatalism of closeness to experience. Against structural eff ects, the psychological dimension does not yield considerable improvement in the explanation of justice ideologies.

Family may be defi ned as a relatively durable group of persons which is based on blood relations, is caused by marriage eventually by adoption and its main functions are reproduction, upbringing, but also carry over cultural models. Meaning of marriage institution is very often discussed topic not only in context of this defi nition. These discussions are provoked not only by opinions and questions in terms of marriage as an outworn institution, but also by the results of demographic statistic. In these results we can see trends of decreasing nuptiality, perhaps even weakening of family in the basic word sense (low fertility in general, growth of proportion of extramarital born children etc.). Introductory part of this article aff ords view of continuance of nuptiality during the twentieth century and also outline of some aspects that contribute to current nuptiality situation. The second part is focused on attitudes of Czech public towards marriage and on their ideas about importance and sense of marriage as well as.

The article stands as a second part of a series about the question answering process during standardized surveys and elaborates the memory retrieval phase. At the beginning the main psychological conceptions of memory are introduced (structure, traits, information types), which are then used for the analysis of the function of memory during survey answering process. The second part deals with the issue of factual information retrieval: the topic of initial encoding of the information into the memory; the role of cognitive keys in case of further retrieval; and consequences of those for the possibilities of the standardized inquiry. The attention is paid also to the problem of inaccessible information and to the usage of more general parts of autobiographical memory (schemas, scenarios etc.) instead of original entries. The third part elaborates the issues of temporal information retrieval like strategies used by respondents or biases emerging in case of them (e.g. seam eff ect and telescoping).

The article is based on the importance of the political culture in czech public opinion. Following the data obtained at Public Opinion Research Centre´s polls the author analyse how critical are czech citizens when talking about political culture of most of politically active people. The fi rst part of the article is devoted to the explanation of the concept of political culture and its use in sociological and politological theory.

The agenda setting function of mass media became one of the most pervasive concept examining long term eff ects of mass media on society. Meanwhile most of the media scholars works have focused on the relationships of media agenda and public agenda in the last thirty years, there is lack of empirical works dealing with aspects of agenda building process so far, above all aspects concerning mutual infl uences of various media contents. Presented paper examine intermedia agenda setting of Czech national media. Based on quantitative content analysis it search the regular patterns of “media quoting other media” and contexts in which media refer to other media as a source of information.

The text with some additions introduces to Czech audience a work of Scott L. Althaus and Devon M. Largio, who back in 2004 were analyzing origins and consequences of shift in America’s public enemy no. 1 from Osama bin Laden to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein that occurred during period after 9/11 terrorist attacks on WTC and Pentagon and before U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. By charting the changing levels of public attention given to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in American news coverage and in president G. W. Bush’s public statements and by comparison of these trends with a full range survey fi ndings that appear to reveal widespread misperceptions about the link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, their analysis provided a clear perspective on the timing and impact of the administration’s communication eff orts as well as revealed a fact contradictory to popular view that mistaken beliefs about Saddam Hussein’s culpability were less a product of the Bush administration’s public relations campaign than of the 9/11 attacks themselves. The text tries to point out some more general incidence of these fi ndings relating to relationship of political, news and public agendas as well as methodology and interpretations of polls.

The electronic version of the second number of the fifth 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.

The electronic version of the first number of the sixth 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.

A little personal recollection of Pavel Machonin.

Profile of scientist Pavel Machonin.

Using the concept of subjective social distance we focus on perceptions of occupational categories. First, the theoretical concept of social distance is introduced as a tool for measuring social stratification. Second, subjective hypothetical interactional distances to 22 occupational stimuli are analyzed with data from the Social Distances 2007 survey. People rate the stimuli hierarchically analogous to occupational prestige and socioeconomic status; however some minor divergence can be detected.