Exploring Political Culture through the Lens of Party Affect: The Case of the Czech Republic (1996-2021)

One view of democratic governance is that it is based on citizen representation in parliament and government by parties. Schattschneider (1942: 3) famously stated that ‘The political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.’ From this perspective, representative democracy is dependent on the existence of political party organisations; and citizens’ positive attitudes toward parties. However, in many democratic systems, popular views of parties have become increasingly negative where an anti-party sentiment exists (Kölln & Pedersen, 2024). Curiously, this long-term secular trend of disliking parties, evident in declines in party membership and negative perceptions of the motivations of party members and future election candidates, exists with increasing affective polarisation. In the USA and elsewhere, positive affect toward parties has been largely constant over time, what has increased is negative feelings towards rival parties (e.g. Abramowitz & Webster 2018). This paper will examine the Czech Republic, which as a post-communist state has never had high levels of party attachment and there is a strong anti-party legacy grounded in a dissident yearning for a non-party form of democratic politics which never emerged. Using the CSES party dislike-like question, which has become the standard comparative measure of affective polarisation, this paper will study the evolution of Czech voters’ affective evaluation of parties as a pertinent indicator of a political culture where democratic governance is defined in terms of popular support for parties (Wagner 2021). By viewing political culture through the lens of party affect, it is argued that it is possible to deal in a tractable way with the question of whether Czech democratic political culture is eroding, evolving or resilient. Latent class analysis of CSES party dislike-like data across 7 general elections between 1996 and 2021 reveals four distinct groups in Czech society: moderate positive affect toward parties on the 'left' (34%) and 'right' (35%); plus, an 'alienated' (18%) group who dislike all parties, and a 'indifferent' group (6%) who refuse to answer the party dislike-like question. This pattern is consistent across 25 years indicating that Czech democratic political culture has not eroded. Moreover, Czech political culture has not become more polarised in terms of policy or ideology. The stability observed is surprising because there has been a transformation of the Czech party system through an initial phase of high electoral volatility followed by fragmentation that resulted in the rapid decline (and disappearance) of older left-right parties and the emergence of successful new non-ideological 'populist' type parties since 2010 (Balík & Hloušek 2016; Havlík & Lysek 2022; Maškarinec & Novotný 2024). The persistence of an alienated and indifferent segment, that constitutes about a quarter of Czech society, suggests there is a stable reservoir of discontent that would not be too unhappy if there were regime change as occurred in late 1989. The implication here is highlighting polarisation as a motor of political change runs the risk of ignoring long-term trends of dissatisfaction with political parties and their dominant role in democratic political culture.