Czech Journal of Political Science

Political Views of Poles and Electoral Preferences in the 2023 Parliamentary Election

Dawid Pieniężny — 2026-10-13

The political views of the electorate are reflected in electoral preferences, but a proper understanding of classical ideological attitudes is difficult in Poland due to inconsistencies in the programmes and practices of political parties and the specific awareness of voters towards the issue under study. The aim of this study was to identify the relationship between electoral preferences and political views of respondents. The study poses two main research questions: (Q1) Do the declared political views of the respondents coincide with their actual political views? (Q2) Is there a correlation between respondents' political views and electoral preferences? The author's survey, conducted on a group of adult Poles (N=1069), allowed to verify the initial assumptions and to indicate important conclusions, confirming that the declared political views of Poles coincide with their actual views only on the ideological level, and that the actual political views of respondents are related to their electoral preferences, depending on: voters with a conservative worldview prefer right-wing conservative parties, while voters with a liberal worldview choose left-liberal parties in the highest percentage.

Selective EU Framing on Twitter: Party Leaders Across Six Member States, 2007–2022

Jan Kovář — 2026-10-13

This article examines how political party leaders frame the European Union on Twitter and what this reveals about elite strategies of EU politicisation. Building on scholarship that calls for integrating meaning-making into politicisation research, it asks which frames dominate elite EU communication and which party-level and contextual factors predict the presence of EU framing. We analyse tweets from party leaders in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia between 2007 and 2022, combining manual content analysis with time-series cross-sectional regression. Five EU-related master frames are identified: economic, cultural/identity, sovereignty, democracy-legitimacy and security. EU framing in leaders’ EU-related tweets is rare: almost 85 per cent contain none of these frames, and when framing is present, it is dominated by economic and security perspectives. The likelihood of framing is structured by ideology. Right-leaning, TAN-oriented, and especially radical-right parties act as the most consistent framing entrepreneurs, while centrist actors also engage under specific conditions; government status and party size matter little. Contextual effects are conditional, with Brexit as the only crisis robustly associated with heightened framing. We also find no strong evidence of a distinctive Central and Eastern European sovereigntist pattern. These results position framing as a complementary dimension of politicisation strategies and underline the selectivity of elite EU meaning-making on social media.

Mapping and Analysing Political Science Research in a Post-Communist Country

Jakub Čapek — 2026-10-13

The extreme territorial fragmentation of the Czech Republic, characterised by over 6,250 municipalities, makes it a uniquely valuable testing ground for international theories on local democracy, decentralisation, and democratic resilience. This study aims to map and analyse the evolution of political science research on Czech local politics from 1993 to 2025. The authors compiled a comprehensive database of 324 peer-reviewed articles extracted from Web of Science, Scopus, and 28 domestic Czech journals. The analyses reveal significant changes within the discipline. Most notably, there is a shift from publishing in Czech to English, driven by national research evaluation frameworks and the pursuit of global visibility. The most productive authors are distributed across a wide range of universities and research institutions, indicating a healthy lack of institutional monopolisation. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that Czech local politics is a highly interdisciplinary field, spanning numerous thematic strands from traditional political science to public administration, sociology, and economics. However, a significant structural challenge persists as the discipline remains heavily male-dominated, with a pronounced gender gap in publication output. By synthesising thirty-three years of scholarly output, this study not only identifies existing thematic gaps but also establishes a foundational framework for future comparative research within the Central and Eastern European context.

Post hoc Theorising in Rational Choice Research on Voting: Revisiting an Old Debate

Mateusz Wajzer — 2026-10-13

According to Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, the inclusion of consumption benefits in Anthony Downs’ rational choice model of voting by William Riker and Peter Ordeshook is an example of methodologically flawed post hoc theorising. In this article, I argue that Riker and Ordeshook employed a methodologically sound strategy for building theory. This strategy is based on two cognitive procedures: idealisation and concretisation. Idealisation allows researchers to focus on the most important features of the phenomenon being modelled, whereas concretisation enables initially omitted elements to be gradually added back to the model. Concretising a model in response to disconfirming empirical data is a commonly applied method of reconciling theory with reality in the empirical sciences.