(New) media and civic practices in the Czech Republic

New media has been on the radar of scholars for more than two decades and countless research has been conducted since the attempt to map the transformation of political communication, civic practices and participation. Existing research addressed questions such as: What role do new media play in political participation? Do they broaden the repertoire of participatory practices? What are the differences and relationship between online and traditional participation? However, answers to these questions are hardly satisfying yet. In this paper I would like to try to go back to these questions and build on our previous qualitative research on the civic practices with a specific focus on the role of media in civic practices. The research indicated that Czechs experience a similar crisis in relation to institutional politics as their counterparts in long established democracies. However, the study does not indicate a radical, new media-driven transformation of citizenship, rather it suggests subtle shifts in practices and a pragmatic mixing of face-to-face communication and traditional media with new communication technologies. In this paper I would like to test some assumptions – derived from our qualitative research – on survey data. The survey's goal is to deliver insight into the relation between the ways Czech citizens use traditional and new media and the ways they participate in political and public issues. The survey data (N=1998) was collected by the Median agency in October and November 2014, using quota sampling and computer-assisted personal interviewing. Specific construction of the questionnaire enables to research the media-related practices in more complex way than usually used research tools do – and connect them to civic practices. In general I would like to address questions: How different are media practices of citizens who participate and those who don’t? How different are media practices between online citizens and those who participate in more traditional way? The data thus enable to illustrate the specifics in media-related practices (from TV news to social networking sites) of those who do not participate at all, those participating in traditional ways and citizens preferring online participation. Our preliminary data shows, that despite the relatively high penetration of the internet – for a majority of the Czech audience, TV broadcasting maintains the role as the most important source for news in general. The same can be said about political news in particular: almost one third of the Czech 18+ population receives news about politics via TV broadcasting.