Dynamic roll call analysis of parties’ ideological positions in the Czech Republic

ABSTRACT

A classification of the party system in the Czech Republic has been challenging. The party system is usually assigned to a type of either moderate or polarised pluralism. Unfortunately, based on easily accessible electoral results, scholars employ counting statistics such as electoral volatility and party system fragmentation analysis excessively. However, to classify the system according to Sartorian typology, ideological patterns should not be ignored. Furthermore, it is not enough to treat ideology statically. Therefore, I propose a new complementary method of dynamic analysis of parties’ ideological positions based on scrutiny of roll calls to study the party system in the Czech Republic between 1993 and 2017. I delineate parties’ ideological positions (left-right axis) through time and classify the party system as a moderate pluralism. Since the results contradict some earlier findings about the Czech party system, it appears to be a promising additional tool to help study party systems in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Party system
• parliament
• roll call analysis
• ideology
• Czech Republic

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Thomas Bräuninger, Miloš Brunclík, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Lukáš Hájek is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. His main research interest is parliamentarism, legislative behaviour, and Czech politics.

Notes

1 Downs’ theory is not accepted uncritically as his assumption of unidimensionality is not always met (Stokes, 1963) and a practical application is questioned as well (Riker, 1962; Robertson, 1976). However, spatial modelling found its respected role and is commonly utilised today.

2 A secret vote is used almost exclusively to elect the president of the Chamber of Deputies and vice-presidents and the chairperson of commissions and committees.

3 Even though 10.47% of the MPs changed their parliamentary group affiliation during their deputy mandates, I consider the selected partisan delineation as illuminating and I do not track the moves. Most of the defections are acts of individual legislators that do not change the overall political environment in the legislature. In rare cases, whole groups defected in order to establish new political parties (e.g. the deputies of KDU-ČSL in 2009 founding TOP 09 or the MPs of VV in 2012 establishing LIDEM). Nevertheless, the defectors are often too weak to form a new parliamentary party group and they therefore stay as officially independent. Thus, none of the group defections are tracked as new parties’ positions.

4 The analysis of eigenvalues in the third term between 1998 and 2002 suggests an existence of even the third dimension of the competition. To explain this, the term coincided perfectly with the accession negotiations between the Czech Republic and the European Union (1998–2002), which could possibly open another dimension. However, this does not change the fact that the left-right axis was the principal ideological dimension.

5 It is possible to consider the 90-degree interval as problematic at least. The angle is justifiable in the case of the two-dimensional Czech competition but it may be very likely different under a different setting. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a primary analysis of a scrutinised political system first, identify a number of driving dimensions, and make several robustness analyses similar to those presented here.

6 Despite this adjustment, the computation of all the parameters takes approximately 100 hours.

7 The numerical values of the results may be found in supplementary materials: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XNMFRU

8 Position of SPR-RSČ can be startling. Even though the party is commonly defined as extremely right (Havlík & Kopeček, 2008; Hloušek, 2010), in Figure 2 it is located close to the communists. Nevertheless, SPR-RSČ operated mainly along the nationalist dimension rather than the socio-economic cleavage, where it is not reasonable to define radical right parties in general (Rovny, 2013).

9 Even though a composition of the seats in the chamber changes in the election years, I still present both the polarisation index and centre of gravity. In the electoral years, I calculate polarisation index (centre of gravity) twice for two periods, before and after the election. Then, I take weighted average of these values based on a proportion of roll calls recorded during the respective years before and after the election.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the Charles University Research Programme ‘Progres’ Q18 – Social Sciences: From Multidisciplinarity to Interdisciplinarity.