Parties in the Policy Space: The Case of the Czech Republic

Abstract

This article is based on a top-down approach to investigating political interactions between parties and voters and introduces the policy-space perspective into this approach. Its basic premise is as follows: through the application of categories of the proximity/distance of political actors, confl icts latently or manifestly present in a party system can be represented in the policy space. Mapping the policy space traces these relationships and helps to answer the question: What are the positions of political parties on the selected political topics? After providing an overview of existing scholarship on policy-space perspective in Czech politics, the article introduces and discusses a substantive and methodological decision that must be made in this type of research. The empirical part of the article replicates key aspects of Kenneth Benoit's and Michael Laver's study mapping policy spaces in modern democracies. The article employs as yet unpublished data from a late 2008 expert panel on the political positions of Czech parliamentary political parties. On the basis of this data the article seeks to answer the following research questions: What is the character of the Czech policy space? What is the relationship between substantive policy dimensions and the synthetic right-left dimension? What additional potential does mapping the policy space offer in comparison with research based on other premises?

Looking Back on Corruption: Representations of Corruption and Anti-corruption in Czech Party Manifestos between 1990–2017

“…The position of corruption as a major public and political issue is also reflected in the sheer amount of coverage it receives in Czech social sciences in general. Social scientists in the country have investigated a wide range of topics in connection with corruption, dominated by issues such as: the manifestations of corruption under the communist regime and the transformations that followed (Chytilek and Svačinová 2019;Plaček et al 2021), public perceptions of corruption (Smith 2010;Plaček et al 2022), measuring corruption (Bašná 2019;Pinková and Jusko 2021) and the link between corruption and social movements (Císař 2003;Školník 2021a). Despite the extensive scope of Czech research on corruption, some have criticized the very limited attention paid to how corruption is generally understood in the Czech Republic, including which actors or practices are recognized as corrupt (Školník 2021b).…”