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The analysis of the concept of the nation, the meaning of Czech history and the concept of the newly established Czech state in the works of three important Czech sociologists – Masaryk, Chalupný and Bláha – reveals two fundamental facts. First, the requirement of political independence of the Czech nation was not only a random political initiative, but – in addition to involvement by other sciences such as history and philosophy – sociology contributed significantly to the new state’s legitimacy through its scientific methods. If Masaryk emphasizes the spiritual mission of the Czech nation in legitimizing the Czech state, the legitimacy of the Czech programme of political independence arises not only from historically philosophical and ethnographic relations, but also from anthropogeographic relations, i.e. from nature itself. In his structural-functionalist analysis, Bláha acknowledges the importance of geographical and biological factors in the formation of the nation, but for him, the nation in the Masaryk tradition is primarily a cultural and spiritual community. Whatever the factor, the fundamental benefit of these sociological analyses is that efforts to shape national identity and build an independentCzechoslovak state were significantly supported by both the theoretical development of Czech sociology and its institutionalization at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This paper investigates the role of civic culture and other political factors in support for democracy in the Czech Republic during the decade followingEUaccession. The goal is to assess the validity of civic virtue theory and to compare the impact of these factors on affective legitimacy using theISSPCitizenship modules 2004 and 2014. The authors’ findings show rather weak but stable effects of the horizontal dimension of civic culture – social trust (but not membership in civic organizations), while the influence of the vertical dimension (trust in institutions, political interest, voting) is more variable, influenced by political turbulences. The time comparison also provides evidence of influence of right-wing political ideology and strong and stable effects of evaluations of political and economic performance.