The contribution of the following article is based on contribution to current discussion related to political populism. The study is anchored in theoretical approaches to populism and designed as CAQDAS of stenographs of speeches related to the “migration crisis” held by members of the Czech Chamber of Deputies. According to the theory of populism, we derived criteria for measuring populism and those were in the analytical part applied to analyzed data corpus. Main contributions of our study are following: 1. operationalization of analytical possibilities of the concept; 2. using valid and analytically relevant data that are not frequently used; 3. broadening of Czech debate related to populism (by empirically proving, that political party Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) is using very strong populist rhetoric 4. building ground for possible following research od populism in Czech/ European context.

Who are initiators of local referendas in the Czech Republic? This topic is not deeply examined in the Czech space. Most of the research are focused on legislative rules and their using or on quantitative analysis, where and when the referendas were held and if they were successful. However, there is one important thing which is not explained. There is missing explanation, which is focused on initiation of referenda and actors who participate in this process. The answer is very important, because as we can see from different kind of research – the political actor – is very often the most important part of the process. Based on this, the main goal of this research is to identify initiators of local referendas in period 2006-2016 and explain them.

There isn´t general consensus concerning the tools for evaluating of decentralization and public administration reforms. Comparison of impacts and tools for the evaluation of decentralization process is complicated mainly by a different arrangement of public administration, researching only partial aspects of decentralization or lack of key data. The aim of this paper is to legitimize the innovative approach of evaluation of the decentralization reforms through an analysis of subnational units´ staff. This consideration is based on correlation which suggests that countries with a higher degree of autonomy of subnational units usually have a wider bureaucratic apparatus of self-governments. In this context we answer whether the evaluation of Czech decentralization is relevant through an analysis of self-governmental staff and under which methodological preconditions. We worked with fragmented statistical unique and unpublished primary data about the self-governmental staff obtained from registers of the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Finance and the Czech Statistical Office.