A breaking-up of a pro-European consensus: Attitudes of Czech political parties towards the European integration (1998-2010)

This article represents a contribution to the debate over the attitudes of political parties to the European integration-one of the hot topics in contemporary political science. It explores the dynamics of attitudes of political parties in the Czech Republic to the EU and analyzes them in the context of parties primary ideologies. On the basis of the results of an expert survey the author interpretes the changes in the major features of “European” debate in the Czech Republic and offers a new classification schema of attitudes of political parties towards the EU, according to the preferences of economic and/or political dimension of European integration.     

Two dimensions of the Europeanization of election programs: The case of the Czech Republic

This article represents a contribution to the debate over the Europeanization of political parties, one of the hot topics in contemporary political science. It explores the extent of Europeanization in political parties represented in the lower chamber of the Parliament of the Czech Republic by means of an analysis of party election manifestoes. The extent of Europeanization in these documents is analyzed using a bi-dimensional conceptualization. The first we call the quantitative dimension, assesses the space taken by the topic of European integration in each manifesto. The second one we call the qualitative dimension. This, using the analysis of content, measures the degree to which the European integration issue is elaborated in the programs. Using this conceptualization, we analyze the election manifestoes of five Czech political parties in the period 1996–2006.