Legitimacy and Civic Culture: Trust in Democracy in the Czech Republic after EU Accession (2004-2014).

This paper investigates the role of civic culture and other political factors in support for democracy in the Czech Republic during the decade following EU accession. The goal is to assess the validity of civic virtue theory and to compare the impact of these factors on affective legitimacy using the ISSP Citizenship modules 2004 and 2014. The authors’ findings show rather weak but stable effects of the horizontal dimension of civic culture – social trust (but not membership in civic organizations), while the influence of the vertical dimension (trust in institutions, political interest, voting) is more variable, influenced by political turbulences. The time comparison also provides evidence of influence of right-wing political ideology and strong and stable effects of evaluations of political and economic performance.