Suchergebnisse

The last few years have witnessed an intensified academic debate on the potential of online social networking sites (SNSs) in the Czech Republic. However, the ensuing academic discussions focused mostly on the SNS pages of political parties. Politicians in particular have recently become the focus of attention in the shift towards research exploring the use of SNSs. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the role of Facebook in the communication of parties and candidates during the Czech parliamentary elections in 2013. We analyse the adoption of Facebook as a mobilization tool by seven parties as well as by 200 individual deputies, looking for similarities and differences in terms of the adoption, strategy and engagement of users. Although party influence seems to be a significant predictor of Facebook adoption, our data also indicate that using other digital channels increases the chances of higher engagement on Facebook at the individual level.

This book chapter is closed access. ; This case study analyzes the use of social media in the campaign for the historically first direct presidential elections in the Czech Republic in January 2013. Following a brief outline of the political context and outcomes of the elections, this study explores and compares the strategies of campaign communication of the nine presidential candidates on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. Apart from mapping the dynamics of the campaign and the responsiveness of Facebook and Twitter users, we have used content analysis to examine basic formal characteristics of over one thousand messages posted on Facebook in the course of the campaign by the candidates and their teams. Additionally, this chapter also examines more closely the place of social media in the campaign of Karel Schwarzenberg, the eventual runner-up of the presidential race, whose team distanced all other candidates in both the extent as the level of sophistication of communication carried via the social networking sites. Overall, the presidential elections has revealed both the potential as well as limits of electoral mobilization through social networks, while at the same time it has demonstrated the continuing importance of more traditional means of campaign communication in the Czech Republic.

This paper is closed access until 12 months after the date of publication. ; This paper analyses the contemporary public debate about vaccination, and medical knowledge more broadly, in the context of social media. The study is focused on the massive online debate prompted by the Facebook status of the digital celebrity Mark Zuckerberg, who posted a picture of his two-month-old daughter, accompanied by a comment: "Doctor's visit -- time for vaccines!" Carrying out a qualitative analysis on a sample of 650 comments and replies, selected through systematic random sampling from an initial pool of over 10,000 user contributions, and utilising open and axial coding, we empirically inform the theoretical discussion around the concept of the reflexive patient and introduce the notion of multi-layered reflexivity. We argue that the reflexive debate surrounding this primarily medical problem is influenced by both biomedical and social scientific knowledge. Lay actors therefore discuss not only vaccination, but also its political and economic aspects as well as the post-truth information context of the debate. We stress that the reflexivity of social actors related to the post-truth era re-enters and influences the debate more than ever. Furthermore, we suggest that the interconnection of different layers of reflexivity can either reinforce certainty or deepen the ambiguity and uncertainty of reflexive agents.

This paper presents an exploratory typological analysis of young people (aged 15–30) as political and civic actors in Estonia and the Czech Republic. We compare youth civic engagement patterns in these two East European countries, sharing similar socio-historical contexts, and analyse the sociodemographic and attitudinal profiles of the resulting participation types. The study draws on Estonian and Czech data sets collected from November to December 2016 within the Horizon 2020 project CATCH-EyoU – Constructing AcTive CitizensHip with European Youth: Policies, Practices, Challenges and Solutions. Two independent methods (latent class analysis and cluster analysis) demonstrated shared patterns in the political and civic activities employed by the Estonian and Czech participants, suggesting the existence of four clearly distinguishable types of young citizens. A more detailed analysis revealed that the socio-demographic and attitudinal profiles of active young people, and therefore, the factors of political socialization, differed quite substantially in the two countries

How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on 'good citizenship'? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 12 disciplines. We used textual analysis software TLAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.