Suchergebnisse

The article focuses on the changes in the determination of educational aspirations that took place in the Czech Republic during its social, political and economic transformation. The aim of the article is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the changes in the stratification system after 1989, which were significantly influenced by changes in the causal mechanisms behind the formation of educational aspirations. Those changes in the determinants of educational aspirations were themselves largely driven by the expansion of economic returns to education and thus the increasing significance of education for life success. The empirical research is based on a comparison of data from the 'Family '89' (Rodina '89) survey conducted in January 1989 and the Czech module of the longitudinal survey PISA-L 2003. The analyses were carried out with the hypothesis that the social origin of the background family had a much stronger direct impact on the educational aspirations of adolescents in 1989, while in 2003 social origin had a much stronger indirect influence. The stronger direct impact in 1989 was due to the very limited access to higher education under socialism and the role higher education played in the reproduction of the cultural elite. But with the gradual expansion of, and the rapidly increasing returns to, higher education during the transition period, social origin began to have a largely indirect effect on aspirations, particularly through the value pupils began to place on higher education as a means of ensuring a higher degree of life success. The authors' empirical findings confirm the hypothesis about the change from direct to indirect effects and highlight the importance of researching educational aspirations from a historical point of view and in the context of social change.

We use EU SILC data for the Czech Republic to estimate the size of the motherhood penalty for the period 2006-2017. We find out that adjusted motherhood penalty amounts to 11-15% in the period 2006-2008. At that time, the Czech Republic appeared to be comparable to countries such as Germany and the UK. However, the motherhood penalty effectively disappears after 2009 and the Czech Republic is now placed in the same group with Scandinavian countries, France and Belgium. Despite that, there are still many obstacles for mothers to increase their labour market participation, which translate mainly into wage penalties via the experience and labour intensity channels. The study also supports other general evidence from cross-country motherhood penalty comparisons, motherhood penalty being mostly a phenomenon of middle-educated, married women located outside large cities, employed in private industry and having more than one child.

The study provides estimates of the size of the fatherhood premium for the Czech Republic in the years 2006-2017, using data from the EU SILC survey. In the years 2006-2009, the fatherhood premium in the Czech Republic does not manifest itself if explanatory variables include the marriage premium and the partner's labour market participation. The fatherhood premium only starts to express itself in 2010 and the following years, when it reaches values from 11% to 15% as a consequence of a decision of families with high-income fathers to have a third child in the years after 2010.

The article deals with the factors that affect the tax morale of the population of the Visegrad Four countries, i.e. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The evaluation of the answers of the respondents of the European Values Study to the question of whether they justify tax evasion serves as an indicator of tax morale. The authors work on the one hand with the frequency of answers expressing a complete rejection of fraud and on the other hand with average answers on a scale from 1 to 10. Respondents from Slovakia were found to be justifying tax fraud the most, and Polish and Hungarian residents agreed with tax evasion the least. Furthermore, the dependence of tax morale on gender, religion and satisfaction with the political system was analysed. Using contingency tables, it was found that all the monitored factors have a statistically significant effect on the tendency of people to justify tax evasion. The only exceptions were the factor of religion in the Czech Republic and the influence of satisfaction with the political system in Poland, where the relationship with tax morale was not confirmed.

EU programme documents designed to influence the social policies of the member states are filled with concepts of social exclusion and social inclusion. This paper aims to clarify these concepts as they are employed in academic and public policy discourse and to discuss the societal function of this discourse and the impact of the European agenda of social inclusion. The authors show that although concepts of social exclusion and social inclusion are far from straightforward in meaning, their influence on public policy discourse and agenda is evident. The reason is that they redirect social policy towards a multidimensional approach, towards balancing rights and obligations, and towards more complex but also local and individualised policies, though the corresponding discourse bears the normative features of a social 'vision'. The EU's social policy agenda exhibits aspirations towards and some potential for achieving real policy change. On the other hand, there are reservations about its true impact. In this respect, the specifi c societal and political context of its implementation plays a crucial role.

This article deals with the political problematisation of gender inequalities in the context of the European Union's gender equality policies on a supranational level. Based on the concept of transnational advocacy networks (TAN), the first part of the article presents the European Women's Lobby and units at the European Commission dealing with gender equality policies as two key actors in TAN that promote gender equality issues within the structures of the EU. The article then moves on to describe policy frame analysis as an approach to analysing the way in which the gender inequalities addressed by these actors are politically problematised in three policy documents connected to the European Commission's 'Roadmap for Equality between Women and Men 2006–2010'. The analysis focuses on the main frames in these documents that legitimise the existence of an independent policy field concerned with gender equality at the EU level and discusses the ramifications of these frames for the promotion of gender equality; for example, how certain policy measures might lead to different outcomes when promoted within different frames.

The article aims to identify the development phases in the process of the regional differentiation in the Czech Republic after 1989, & examines whether this differentiation trend is currently changing. The assumption the article's hypothesis is based on is that during recent development the basic 'parameters' of the principal features of the country's regional structure have been stabilized amidst the conditions of parliamentary democracy & a market economy. Unlike the first phases of socio- economic transition, when differentiating trends prevailed, a certain degree of stabilization can now be assumed, alongside the emergence of new trends. The development of regional differences was analyzed using indicators of GDP, the unemployment rate, entrepreneurial activity, & tax revenue from self- employed physical persons. The findings show that over the course of the 1990s regional differences intensified at both the mezo- regional (regional) level & the micro- regional level. It was also confirmed that at the turn of the millennium the phase of divergent regional development ended, & since that time regional differences have hovered around the same level.

The author, a Czech social anthropologist who returned home from exile in order to help in the introduction of his discipline, writes a field report in which he describes in relative detail the vicissitudes of Czech social anthropology during the last thirteen postcommunist years. Even though lecturing on social anthropology became common in Czech universities, the institutionalization of the discipline encounters stiff resistance from the conservative academic establishment. Social anthropology gets support in new provincial universities (Pardubice, Plzen) & only very reluctantly in Prague (Charles U). As a result, Czech protagonists of social anthropology are scattered throughout various institutions. Nevertheless, the author concludes, social anthropology has become known in the Czech Republic as a dynamic part of the social sciences. Grant agencies have given support to fieldwork projects on minorities, political culture, & identity problems during the transformation process. If the momentum gained during the recent years were to be sustained, social anthropology has a bright future on the Czech academic scene.