Suchergebnisse

Traditionally, political rights are an important component of the relationship between the state and its citizens, and therefore only citizens are entitled to bear them. Nevertheless, due to international migration this approach is subject to change and nowadays many countries give voting rights also to foreigners who are resident there. The attitude of the Czech Republic has so far been conservative, which means that only the minimum standard enacted by European law is accommodated. However, preparatory work on a new electoral code has given rise to a discussion on the possible extension of voting rights also to foreigners from third countries resident in the country. This article tries to enhance the discussion in three ways. The first part consists of an analysis of what the potential percentage of foreign voters is, taking into consideration their geographic distribution in particular municipalities and thus providing an estimate of their influence on local councils. According to the results, potential foreign voters form a relevant minority only in 11 out of 6251 municipalities. The second part is focused on the actual exercise of voting rights by European citizens resident in the Czech Republic, who have it already. A representative survey conducted on a sample of 5% of municipalities shows that the turnout of these voters is negligible (approx. 2.4%), far below the EU average. The last part of the article deals with the legislation in this area which causes crucial obstacles to the real exercise of political rights by foreigners, and therefore is incompatible with the European law. Adapted from the source document.

The theoretical concept of second-order elections has become a useful tool to analyze sub-national and/or supranational elections. This paper tries to apply the concept to the regional elections in the Czech Republic and to challenge the concept by analysis of the personalization of the vote in the regional elections to the assembly of South Moravia in the year 2008. Working with the electoral results (especially with preferential voting), the authors argue that the decisions and preferences of voters were influenced not only by the situation in the main political arena (e.g. by the governing or opposition role of political parties) but also by the composition of party lists, in terms of candidates' connections locally.

This article focuses on proving some of the earlier published hypotheses that criticized the possibility applying the electoral bonus (bonus seats) to elections to the Chamber of Deputies in the Czech Republic. The results of the Czech parliamentary elections held at the very end of May 2010 provide some empirical data for this analysis and help to prove that the mechanism of the electoral bonus is not useful in the Czech political system. The main reasons for this claim are the hypotheses that the electoral bonus should not reinforce the position of the government coalition and that it erodes the will of the people, whose votes in fact count towards the bonus seat(s) of another party (namely that party which receives the electoral bonus). Adapted from the source document.

This article discusses the growing role of China in UN peacekeeping operations since 1989. First, the reasons for the non-engagement of China after its admission to the UN and its Security Council in 1971 are described to stress the difference of the Chinese behavior after the end of the Cold War. Second, the increasing Chinese activity in UN peacekeeping is shown by describing China's gradually changing behavior in three areas: voting in the Security Council, personnel contributions to peacekeeping operations and financial contributions to the UN peacekeeping budget. In the end, the article suggests that China's growing role in UN PKO could be understood as an important part of China's peaceful rise policy. Adapted from the source document.

A pre-election analysis is going to describe the role of self-candidates in the 2006 Czech parliamentary election. The article is focused on the basic characteristics of ballots. The various ballots are compared from different views -- the number of candidates, the demographic representation, the role of local political authorities, & the candidacy of former parliament members. Adapted from the source document.

This article explores the spatial influences that shape the contemporary Czech party system & their consequences for the institutionalization of the party system. First, the regionalization of the party system is measured to identify the specific regional clusters of votes for individual parties. Second, after controlling for the impact of social cleavages, the independent effect of two macro- regions on the differences in voting decisions is analyzed. In the case of Moravia, no such independent effect is evident. Conversely, in the formerly German- inhabited Sudetenland there is an effect on the vote in the case of two parties (KSCM & ODS). The historical reasons for this spatial regime are briefly discussed. Finally, the relative insignificance of spatial regimes in the Czech party system is explained with reference to its high degree of nationalization (the level of spatial heterogeneity in regional voting results). The author employs spatial analytical techniques in the article, such as measures of spatial autocorrelation, the spatial regression model, & the Gini Index. The findings suggest that there is a high degree of spatial institutionalization of the Czech party system & relatively insignificant contextual effects at the macro- regional level.

This paper analyses the effect of turnout on the support of different parties in the Czech Republic. It tests hypotheses derived from American & Western European literature concerning the advantage/disadvantage of higher turnout for particular parties, especially for left-wing parties. The text introduces the main theories & research strategies concerning the partisan effects of voter turnout, & then tests several hypotheses concerning this issue. The analysis uses both aggregate & individual level data. The results show that higher turnout is advantageous for the parties whose voters lack strong party identification (CSSD & the Green Party). On the other hand, it brings lower gains to parties with a disciplined electorate (ODS, KDU-CSL & partly also for KSCM). The case of KSCM points to the curvilinearity of the relationship between turnout & party support. More sophisticated statistical analysis should be used in future research. Adapted from the source document.

This article analyzes the origin & development of the Movement for Autonomous Democracy -- Association for Moravia & Silesia (HSD-SMS) in the early stages of the formation of the Czech political system. The article covers the period of Boleslav Barta's chairmanship. Barta founded & defined HSD-SMS as a non-partisan political movement of all democratic Moravians & Silesians. HSD-SMS achieved surprising success in the first free parliamentary elections held in June 1990 (10% of the total vote for the Czech National Council). However, the following events revealed the inability of HSD-SMS to become a stable part of the Czech political system. The movement had to cope with internal problems & its own unsuccessful parliamentary policy. HSD-SMS did not manage to push through any of their policy goals in the area of territorial & administrative reorganization of the state. The sudden death of the leader Boleslav Barta accelerated the movement's decline. In addition, HSD-SMS lacked the attributes of modern political parties. References. Adapted from the source document.

The article explores several reasons why women in Czech politics are underrepresented not only relative to their overall share in the society but also relative to their presence at lower levels of politics. The article tests two principal hypotheses using data from both a unique post-electoral public opinion survey carried out in the Olomouc region in 2010, and from official electoral statistics. First, it concentrates on the structural barriers of female underrepresentation presented by the candidate nomination and selection processes of the political parties. Second, it explores the possibility that more flexible candidate lists are beneficial for female representation. We compare the proportions of preference votes received by women both prior to and after electoral reforms in 2010, which for the first time gave voters the possibility to cast four preference votes and thus made the list structures more flexible. The research design includes both OLS and logistic regression models, which specify the empirical relationships derived from previous theoretical debates. The results suggest that Czech women are heavily disadvantaged by the Czech parties' candidate selection mechanisms, and also that we do not have enough evidence to conclude that flexible lists are more conducive to higher female representation. The article concludes by considering various institutional means of reducing female political underrepresentation, including the introduction of electoral gender quotas. Adapted from the source document.

In the Slovak parliamentary elections of 2010, the reformist centre-right parties defeated the left-nationalist coalition government led by Robert Fico. The election results brought some other surprises – the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia and its leader, three-times Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, as well as the Party of Hungarian Coalition were eliminated from the national parliament. Moreover, the election outcome of the radical right-wing Slovak National Party declined significantly. On the other hand, two new parties entered parliament. All in all, the election outcomes show the weakening of the nationalist agenda and the nationalist vote. The paper examines why this has happened and raises the question of to what extent it is sustainable.

The article deals with concepts of the empirical threshold of representation as proposed by Rein Taagepera & the real threshold as proposed by Tomas Lebeda. Both empirical & real thresholds are operational methods of the actual threshold. The empirical threshold indicates the actual share of the vote which a party needs to have a fifty-fifty chance of gaining a seat. The real threshold indicates the minimal actual share of the vote which a party needs to gain representation. The author of the paper argues that real thresholds serve as an illustration of a hypothetical rather than a real situation & they do not always occur between the upper & the lower thresholds. The second part of the paper analyzes the original & the current electoral systems for the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament. While under the current electoral system a party with 6.15 per cent of the vote has a fifty-fifty chance of winning a seat within a district, the share was 4.36 per cent of the vote within the original electoral system. On the other hand, the national empirical threshold is lower under the current electoral system. This is caused by relatively large districts of the original system which are more hospitable to small parties at the district level, but not necessarily from the national perspective. Adapted from the source document.

The paper analyzes the candidate selection procedure in Czech political parties before the elections to the European Parliament. It focuses on the four main Czech political parties: CSSD, KDU-CSL, KSCM & ODS. First, selection procedures are described. The description is based on the analysis of written documents (party statutes & statutes governing candidate selection procedures). Second, the article analyzes candidate selections by applying the classification framework set by Gideon Rahat & Reuven Hazan. This framework emphasizes four dimensions of candidate selection methods: candidacy, party electorates, decentralization, & voting/appointment systems. The findings from the analysis of written documents are compared with the results from a questionnaire survey conducted among the candidates. Candidate selection in CSSD & ODS was centralized in the hands of the narrow central executive & candidacy was limited to party members. On the other hand, candidate selection in KDU-CSL & KSCM was more decentralized, with final decisions taken by widely representative central party bodies. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper seeks to find out to what extent the process of EU accession has influenced legal regulations concerning the creation & functioning of social & political actors. Through the analysis of various statutes & changes made to them, the paper tries to determine the role the EU plays in amending assembly legislation. The actors under scrutiny include political parties, professional organizations, labor unions, & civil society organizations. The paper concludes that the most influenced field of actors was the area of chambers of professionals which was obliged to conform to requirements for the free movement of people & services in the European Union in order to comply with European law. The Czech Republic was quite leisurely in their harmonization of statutes, with the majority of them passed just before accession to the EU. An interesting part of the problem concerns the question of political party membership, which is still reserved only for Czech citizens. However, European citizenship, with its voting rights to the European Parliament & local magistrates, is arguably going to push slowly for change even in this domain. Adapted from the source document.

Does higher turnout support left-wing parties, as many previous studies assume? And does communist legacy somehow project on the mentioned relationship? The theoretical discussion is still relatively unclear. This study proposes three different explanatory mechanisms of examining aggregate-level relationship between turnout and electoral support for political parties in the post-communist milieu. The mainstream hypothesis, based on the assumptions of a successful re-stratification of the society and the relevance of class voting, states that higher turnout benefits the left. The second option is derived from the Michigan model of party identification. In this case, political parties with less loyal electorate should profit from higher rates of electoral participation. However, this article makes a case for a third possible explanation, which turns the conventional hypothesis upside down and can be termed simply as "mobilization against the left". The idea is that the more people come to the polls, the stronger the post-communist right wing parties will be. Moreover, I include in my analysis only two electoral districts (regions) that can be said to be the farthest away from each other in their socioeconomic and political characteristics. Such an approach makes it possible to answer the question whether the expected effect is uniform or unequal across electoral districts in one country. Based on the analysis of election results in 1444 constituencies of two electoral districts in the Central Bohemian and Moravian-Silesian regions in the 2010 Parliamentary elections, I conclude that the proposed approach to the issue of party support and voter turnout has strong empirical support. ; Does higher turnout support left-wing parties, as many previous studies assume? And does communist legacy somehow project on the mentioned relationship? The theoretical discussion is still relatively unclear. This study proposes three different explanatory mechanisms of examining aggregate-level relationship between turnout and ...