Celebrities in Czech politics in 1996–2013

Abstract

The paper deals with the phenomenon of celebrity politics in the Czech Republic, particularly the involvement of celebrities in Czech politics between 1996 and 2013. The authors draw from the celebrity politics’ typologies of Paul ‘t Hart and Karen Tindall, and John Street. Employing a content analysis of newspaper articles from the journals MF Dnes and Blesk during the periods preceding the elections of the Chamber of Deputies, the authors shed light on celebrity involvement in Czech politics. Specifically, they trace three categories mentioned in the media: the celebrity expression of political topics in general, celebrity political endorsement and the candidacy of celebrities. Building upon the collected data, the authors interpret the results within the political and social context of the parliamentary period and indicate more general patterns of celebrity involvement in Czech politics.

Beyond Celebrity Politics: Celebrity as Governmentality in China

“…Besides the above traditional approaches, a relatively new approach, celebrity politics, focuses on the relationship between celebrity and politics over the past two decades (Bennett, 2011;Cooper, 2008;McKernan, 2011;Mukherjee, 2004;Street, 2004;van Elteren, 2013;van Zoonen, 2006;Weiskel, 2005;West & Orman, 2003;Wheeler, 2013). This approach is rooted in the wider context of the mediatization (Esser & Stromback, 2014;Hjarvard, 2013), personalization (Langer, 2012;Ribke, 2015), and celebritization of politics (Coen, 2015;Petrovová & Eibl, 2019) as well as the rise of populist politics (Moffitt, 2016;Street, 2019).…”

“…Studies of celebrity in non-US and non-Western-European political settings do exist. These studies have focused on celebrity and politics from a variety of vantages: the evolving role and changing nature of celebrity in Indian politics and the Indian public sphere (Mukherjee, 2004), the modern Indonesian notion of celebrity from the perspective of the discourses of legitimacy and charisma (Hughes-Freeland, 2007), celebrity political endorsement in Taiwanese political marketing management (Henneberg & Chen, 2007), the celebritization of politics and the attractiveness of celebrity populism in post-communist Eastern Europe (Bartoszewicz, 2019), the gradual increase of celebrity involvement indicating a fresh generation of Czech politicians (Petrovová & Eibl, 2019), and the revolutionary celebrity as an overtly political phenomenon in Syria (Kraidy, 2015).…”

Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics

“…For authors such as Heinich (2012), for instance, celebrity, or fame, is foremost a social quantity, a ratio between how many people one knows and by how many one is known. Others, such as Petrovová and Eibl (2018), have a much more profession-based operationalisation of the term, including entertainers, sportspeople, media personalities, and the like, as being ‘in the business of being known’. We agree in part with the former, in the sense that we conceive of the general concept of visibility as standing at the centre of the notion of celebrity (Brighenti, 2007), an approach also borne out by recent studies in political theory (Green, 2010).…”