2016/2

The electronic version of the second number of the fourteenth 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.

Cross-border cooperation between Czechs and Germans is currently evolving in numerous areas. In recent years, the mining tradition has become the common denominator of cross-border activities in the Ore Mountains region. The study deals with this aspect of Czech-Saxon cross-border cooperation primarily from the perspective of regional development and tourism. It focuses on the Silver Road and its role in contemporary Czech-Saxon cross-border activities. As a symbol of shared heritage, the Silver Road exemplifies the so-called spatial turn, i.e. the cultural-social dimension of cross-border cooperation.

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 article discusses the relationship between educational attainment and the existence of cohabitation in the Czech Republic. Cohabitation of unmarried partners is a timely topic given a constant growth of this form of relationship in the Czech society, which almost tripled between the years 1991 and 2011. Based on data from the ISSP 2012 quantitative survey, the article seeks to demonstrate whether the educational attainment of an individual or his/her partner is associated with whether or not they cohabitate. Cohabitation is juxtaposed to marriage as well as to living-apart-together relationships, with partners living in different households.