Leader as a Focal Point: New Political Entrepreneurs and the Candidate Selection in the Czech Republic

The Paper deals with the new methods of candidate selection and scanning as introduced to the Czech party politics by new entrepreneurial party ANO (“yes” in Czech). This party has used broadly the business-like methods of selection including the evaluation of candidates by professional personalists, scanning of political, economic, and personal careers of the candidates. We will as well analyse other entrepreneurial parties (the Dawn of Direct Democracy and the Public Affairs party) and compare all these cases with traditional ways of candidate selection as provided by the long-term serving Czech parties. We will also discuss the new form of candidate selection from the point of view of intra-party democracy and decision making. The research is based on the collection of primary data on the process of candidate selection, on media outputs, and semi-structured interviews with insiders. The theoretical background will be based mainly on the concepts developed within the research of parties of entrepreneurial cluster (e.g. Harmel and Svåsand 1993, Hopkin and Paolucci 1999, Krouwel 2012, Bolleyer and Bytzek 2013, Arter 2016).