Over-Indebtedness and Distrust in Contemporary Czech Democracy

The crisis and problems of liberal democracies and the success of populist parties in Central Europe have been the subject of much debate. This study focuses on a specific under-researched micro-level of people who have fallen into a debt trap and ended up in debt enforcement in the Czech Republic. Debt enforcement has long been an extremely sensitive socio-economic issue in this country, affecting almost a tenth of the adult population. Using original survey data, we examine the impact of debt enforcement on political trust in democracy as a political regime, support for democratic institutions, political actors, and the rise of populists. The basic conceptual framework is democratic legitimacy (e.g., Lipset 1959; 1960; Linz 1988), the broader concept of political support that has long accompanied the debate on support for political regimes and support for a government (e.g., Easton 1959, 1975) and studies analysing dissatisfaction with democracy and representative institutions in Western and Central Europe (e.g., Rose, Mishler, Haerpfer 1998; Norris 1999; Hans-Dieter Klingemann 1999; Dalton 2004; Dogan 2005; Torcal and Montero 2006; van der Meer and Hakhverdian 2016; Martini and Quaranta 2020; Devine and Valgarðsson 2023).