Local Lists in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Since the first democratic election in 1990, the independent coalitions have belonged to significant political participants on the local level. At the beginning of this century, their importance still rose and the independent participants reached representations in various forms, even on the higher levels of the Czech political system. In the following text, we will describe the definition, occurrence, successfulness, character, importance and perspective of the independent and non-partisan coalitions in the Czech Republic. The goal is to create a set of basic assumptions, enabling us to compare independent and non-party groupings existing in the Czech local politic system and other European countries.

This article is a result of a grant research of the Czech Science Foundation n. 407/06/P077 “Europeanisation of Czech Local Politics. Political Science Analysis of European Legislative Trends”, and its elaboration was supported by research project MSM0021620841 “Development of Czech Society in the EU: Challenges and Risks”. A pillar of the methodology apparatus was a new usage of existing data. In this connection, it should be mentioned that the coalition research in the Czech local politics, was based on the questionnaire research and the data analysis. The data comes from seminar work realised within the frame of the course ‘Czech Local Politics’ at the Faculty of Social Science of Charles University (Jüptner 2004, 2006).