No abstract

No abstract

The paper deals with the ideological position of a newly formed business-firm party called ANO in the contemporary political environment of the Czech Republic. Although the advent of the party was truly rapid and ANO is a fairly unique formation, it is possible to employ some conventional analytical tools to reveal the party’s ideological position. Firstly, I show that ANO is a vote-seeking party and it is therefore possible to analyse it in accordance with a Downsian spatial modelling. Next, I describe a roll call analysis method that is able to objectively identify the party’s ideological position based on legislators’ parliamentary votes. After I form several hypotheses, a data set consisting of 8,559 roll calls of 215 members of the Chamber of Deputies is depicted. Finally, the results show that ANO is located in the ideological centre, closer to social democrats rather than to right-wing parties. Besides this, ANO covers a smaller ideological space compared to traditional political parties. Finally, the results do not anticipate a potential split of ANO in the near future since the party’s legislators have acted cohesively in the parliament so far.

This article deals with the dimensions of politics in the Czech Republic since the state’s establishment in 1993 until 2017. It utilizes MPs’ votes by roll call in the Chamber of Deputies, which is the polity’s centre of gravity. The analysis suggests that two principal drivers shape Czech politics – an ideological (socio-economic left vs right) dimension and an institutional (government vs opposition) division. Due to the changing forms of the ruling cabinets, the dimensionality oscillates between unidimensional and two-dimensional (with a specific phase of as many as three relevant dimensions between 1998–2002). Periods of right-oriented majority cabinets result in a unidimensional competition composed of a merged ideological dimension and an institutional division. Stages of left-oriented majority cabinets ideologically split the opposition camp and highlight the unique role of the socio-economic dimension separated from the still dominant institutional division. During the rule of both left- and right-oriented minority cabinets, political competition is mainly driven by the ideological cleavage since the conventional institutional patterns diminish.

No abstract