1 Introduction
The Czech Republic has long been regarded as a poster child of democratisation. While both the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77 ultimately failed, the 1989 Velvet Revolution was very successful in terms of political change, party foundation and economic liberalisation (Vodička 2011). The socialist system literally collapsed and a democratic transition took place without considerable conflicts during negotiations between the supporters of the old system and the opposition. The privatisation was socially mediated by agreements among the state, companies and labour unions. A symbol of the system change was the election of civil rights activist and author Václav Havel as president of state. Even the separation from Slovakia, which had been connected to the country for decades, occurred relatively quietly via peacefully negotiated constitutional decisions at the end of 1992.
In recent years, this image of the Czechs being a poster child of democratisation has changed to a crisis narrative—reason enough to present an actual and comprehensive depiction of the political system of the Czech Republic that contains analyses of the most important features in the period of time since 1990. As an introduction, the apparent crisis of Czech politics will be described in the following, using empirical data. The subsequent section gives an overview of how the country was covered and assessed by political science publications in order to examine the plausibility of the crisis narrative. Based on that, recommendations for future research have been made which include various adjustments. The final section presents some key findings of the book chapters which underlines how this may lead to fruitful insights into the functioning of democracy.
2 Politics in the Czech Republic as a Test Case for Theories and Methods
The political transition and policies in the Czech Republic, founded on 1 January 1993, were often interpreted with reference to the goal of a ‘return to Europe’. In the course of this, Europe was understood as a community of values, as an internal market and as a shelter for national independence. Therefore, the affiliation to advanced national economies and integration into western organisations were particularly important concerns for the Czech Republic. It was the first post-socialist country to join the OECD in 1995 as well as NATO in 1999, which thereby expanded eastwards against Russia’s declared will. The European Union also opened up a clear prospect of accession for the Czech Republic at an early stage. Even before the official negotiations began, the country received subsidies, advice and administrative support. The Czech parliament adopted the EU accession law without much debate and in 2003, 77.3 percent of the participants in the referendum voted in favour of the accession (T. Weiss in this volume).
The change of government took place peacefully, and the new Constitutional Court repeatedly and effectively resolved conflicts in the law and jurisdiction (Pospíšil in this volume; Vodička 2011, p. 301). Only a few years after the collapse of the Czechoslovak Federation, the Czech Republic had a significantly lower unemployment rate, a higher gross domestic product per capita and higher real wage increases than Slovakia, which also seemed to speak for the success of Czech politics (Kosta 1999; Koyame-Marsh 2011). The economy defied the crises by adjusting its course and it continues to grow (Slaný and Lipovská in this volume). In view of the current debate about the distribution of wealth, the imbalance of which is often blamed for the rise of populism, the Czech Republic seems like a paradise, as incomes are very close to each other despite the liberalisation processes. This is reflected by having the second lowest at-risk-of-poverty rate within the EU (Eurostat 2017).
However, recently the Czech Republic seems to have turned into a problem child. For some years now, the party structure has been sliding completely; the major parties have massively lost voters. It is almost impossible to state whether the instability of the governments is driving the dissatisfaction of the population or vice versa. In the 24 years following the foundation of the Czech Republic, only three of the fourteen governments have remained in office for their entire legislative period. Elections are held much more frequently than in other countries, thus giving the citizens the opportunity to express their political will, but the turnout is often low. The voters are increasingly opting for various ever-changing small parties that come and go, while anti-liberal forces are on the rise (Balík and Hloušek as well as Guasti in this volume).
At the local and regional level, parties no longer play a role at all. At the same time, the subnational administrative bodies—at least as far as the administration of the EU is concerned—are patronage-based and ineffective (Formánková in this volume). The living conditions in Prague and the regions formerly specialising in the coal and steel industries, which are undergoing massive economic structural changes, are drifting even further apart. A similar gap has opened up in the relationship between the national and European level. Although the Czech government is now actively involved in shaping EU policy, national politicians seem to have little interest in it and therefore have little expertise (Beger as well as T. Weiss in this volume). Among EU member states, the Czech Republic ranked last in terms of the share of EU supporters in 2017 (Eurobarometer 2017, p. 6). In Brussels, the country has been under criticism as part of the ‘unruly’ and ‘complicated’ Visegrád-4.
After a phase of selling out to the outside world, the media are again increasingly in Czech hands, but marked by media conglomerates around individual owners who used their privileged access to the people to create entrepreneurial parties (Jirák and Köpplová as well as Guasti in this volume). Under the often confusing and fragile domestic political conditions, the presidents of the states have taken a stronger position than it was intended by the constitution and have used unclear legal formulations of competences to their own advantage. The introduction of direct elections has provided an additional argument for an even stronger profile of acting presidents vis-à-vis the government. The Senate as the second chamber of parliament is being questioned by populist parties such as the ANO party (Novotný in this volume).
These developments in the heart of Europe are not only politically explosive, but also an important test case for social science theory and methodology. If democratisation could indeed get into a crisis within such a short period of time, this would invalidate the standard theories on consolidation after system changes. If, on the other hand, the break in development has not happened as such, but has turned out to be the result of earlier scholarly misdiagnoses, then this would call into question the current measurement of democratisation and Europeanisation. The contributions in this volume help to solve this puzzle by empirically tracing, explaining and classifying the Czech political system, its development and politics, and by comparing it to other cases.
3 Phases of Research Between Optimism and Crisis Narrative
It came as a surprise for many observers, when the ‘Velvet Revolution’ was started in Czechoslovakia in 1989, as the country, like the East German GDR, was regarded as an economically highly developed, socially homogeneous and politically stable country which was not marked by the attempts of liberalisation that went on in other socialist countries (Wolchik 1999, p. 437). Subsequent analyses therefore often explained the sudden change of system by external factors. Differences were identified between the Central and Eastern European states, even though they also shared some similar systemic problems created by socialism.
After the reasons for the sudden system change in 1989 had been worked out, democratisation itself attracted scholarly attention. In the Czech Republic, the most debated issue was the design of concrete policies (Roberts 2017). Comparative studies in international journals or volumes were often authored by foreign researchers and used a high level of abstraction. They were based on case studies conducted by local scholars on individual post-socialist countries—including the Czech Republic—which were basically similar in design and compiled in collective works (e.g. Wightman 1995; Dawisha and Parrott 1997; Süssmuth 1998; Elster et al. 1998; Lawson et al. 1999; Kitschelt et al. 1999). Such cooperation often led to the emergence of fixed academic networks, so that the international perspective on the Czech Republic, like on other post-socialist states, was characterised by a limited number of sources and interpretations.
Since the end of the 1990s, stock-taking of the transformation processes and comparative analyses were mostly informed by Western concepts (e.g. Zielonka 2001; Spieker 2003; Bos and Helmerich 2006). They often noted a ‘normalisation’ in the sense of the Czech Republic’s rapprochement with Western societies. Thus Olson (1997, p. 150) conceded that the Czech political and economic system ‘closely follows a western democratic model’. Although deviations and problems were observed, they were not emphasised as dramatic, partly with reference to the short period of time since the system change. Such peculiarities included weak participation, deficiencies in media freedom and authority conflicts (Olson 1997, p. 189). Although there were significant political shifts in the Czech Republic from election to election as well as premature government dissolutions, this was not interpreted as a change in the party system as a whole (Fiala et al. 1999, p. 292, 294). Quite often, different developments have been observed in the Czech Republic and Slovakia since their separation (e.g. Baylis 1998; Hloušek and Kopeček 2008; De Raadt 2009).
Interestingly, comparative studies that appeared much later often remained with the optimistic interpretation of a rapprochement, although they still found striking differences to Western democracies as well as a still highly dynamic development in institutional, party-political and social terms (e.g. Grotz and Müller-Rommel 2011). The deviations again referred particularly to the weak societal anchoring of the parties, to the dissatisfaction with the policies and politics among the population and to the still relatively fluid and volatile party system (e.g. Howard 2003; Bakke and Sitter 2013). The parties were therefore a well-researched issue (e.g. Hanley 2012).
The Czech Republic was no exception in the region with regard to its weakness of political and civil society representation of interests. ...