The Czech Pirate Party : A New Alternative, Not Only for the Young

In 2017, in addition to the traditional, old, and more recently established political parties, a new formation – the Czech Pirate Party – espousing more participative principles, including the use of online platforms for discussions – arrived on the political scene in the Czech Republic. This newcomer to the parliamentary ecosystem, shortly after achieving success at the national level, also managed to attract significant support in local elections. For this reason, there is currently a Pirate Party parliamentary group present in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower chamber of the Czech parliament), while simultaneously the mayor of Prague and members of the ruling coalition in Brno – the second biggest city in the Czech Republic – also represent the Pirate Party. Furthermore, recent opinion polls show support for the Pirates running at about 14%. This is coupled with another new feature: the young age of the party’s elected parliamentarians and local councilors, which brings new challenges to politics. After the elections, a number of commentators immediately dubbed the Pirate Party a ‘youth party.’ But is this really the case? What forms of participation do the party and/or its members use and encourage? This article offers answers to these questions. In particular, it presents the electoral base of this new political party through interpretative analysis. The data are based on election results triangulated with other sources – specifically, a Czech election study is juxtaposed against a quantitative survey carried out by three academic institutions in the Czech Republic (the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University, Brno; Palacký University, Olomouc; and the Institute of Sociology at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague). These statistical tools enable us to identify in great detail the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of Pirate Party voters (for instance: age, education, their views about contemporary democracy, and the timing of their decision to vote) and map their attitudes towards other parties and their leaders. The article reveals how popular the Czech Pirate Party is among the younger generation of voters, where the latter come from, and what political preferences they had previously

Which conservatism? The identity of the Polish Law and Justice party

This article deals with Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS), considered a conservative party in the scholarly literature. Drawing largely on party manifestos, the article demonstrates the character, the specificities and the evolution of the party’s identity and ideology. A theoretical basis for the undertaking is provided by Klaus von Beyme’s concept of party families, Arend Lijphart’s seven ideological dimensions and classic texts on conservatism. The analysis finds that the most important components in PiS’s current identity are Catholicism itself and the great emphasis the party places on the role of the Catholic Church. Also important for the party’s identity are visions of a nation conceived on ethnic principle, a strong and active state able to form society with a national spirit, anti-communism and a negation of developments in Poland since 1989. A substantial role is played by the quasi-religiously conceived legacy of the party’s co-founder, Lech Kaczyński, who tragically perished in an aircraft crash. With its Catholic-nationalist profile, PiS is close to the Christian current within the conservative New Right, and to Polish National Democracy in the interwar period.Článek se zabývá polskou politickou stranou Právo a spravedlnost (PiS), která je v akademické literatuře považována za konzervativní stranu. Smyslem textu je zejména s pomocí stranických programů ukázat charakter, specifika a vývoj stranické identity a ideologie. Teoretickou bází tvoří koncept party families Klause von Beymeho, sedm ideologických dimenzí Arenda Lijpharta a klasické texty zabývající se konzervatismem. Analýza dochází k závěru, že nejdůležitější složkou současné identity PiS jsou katolicismus a s tím spojený enormní důraz na úlohu katolické církve. Dále jsou pro stranickou identitu významné převážně etnicky chápaný národ, vize silného a aktivního státu schopného formovat společnost v národním duchu, antikomunismus a negace vývoje Polska po roce 1989. Značnou roli hraje také kvazinábožensky pojímaný odkaz spoluzakladatele strany Lecha Kaczyńského, který tragicky zahynul při letecké havárii. Svým katolicko-nacionálním profilem má PiS blízko ke křesťanskému proudu konzervativní Nové pravice, podobně jako k polské Národní demokracii mezi světovými válkami