From October 6–8, 2014, following a call by the pro-Kurdish party to protest against the Turkish government’s alleged indifference to the situation in Kobani, protests and violent clashes took place in many provinces of Turkey. In order to contribute to the understanding of the long-running ethnic conflict in Turkey, this paper addresses the contesting political discourses on the Kurdish question by focusing on those events. It comparatively analyzes the selected speeches of the leaders during and immediately after the Kobani events. Applying critical discourse analysis as a conceptual and analytical framework, it concludes that the Kurdish political movement builds its discourse on the ethnic difference and reinforces it with resistance against alleged state pressure and discrimination against the Kurds, while the AK Party’s discourse prioritizes a Muslim fellowship and supports it with promises of social and economic progress.

Corruption and its effects on society are among the frequent topics in academic literature. The same applies to the influence of corruption on trust, whether interpersonal or institutional. But there is no specific research on the impact of corruption on trust in civil servants. Especially in the European post-communist countries, which after 1989 showed institutional weakness and politicization of public administration, it is necessary to ask whether the accession to the European Union and the adoption of the civil service laws helped to reduce corruption in the eyes of citizens and mainly to increase their trust in civil servants. However, the analysis carried out in seven post-communist countries reveals that people still do not trust the civil servants much. In addition, public not only perceives a significant number of civil servants as corrupt, but even encounters corrupt cases while dealing with them. Corruption is also a phenomenon that reduces citizens’ trust in civil servants.

This article explores the understudied question of who is likely to become a minister in the Czech Republic. It analyses some of the key characteristics of Czech ministers in the period from 1993 till 2018: we focus mainly on education and carriers before and after the office. The first goal is to identify reservoir pools from which Czech ministers tend to be recruited. The second is to apply a new typology based on Blondel’s distinction between specialists and generalists, combined with the distinction between politicians and technocrats. Individual governments are then compared based on the relative representation of each of these types of ministers.

In recent years a massive right-wing conservative attack has appeared across European countries aimed against the so-called gender ideology/theory. On the example of various written and spoken texts produced by politicians, scholars, conservative NGOs, and churchmen I elucidate that such “anti-gender” discourse does not avoid even the Central Europe or, more precisely, Slovakia. These texts are compared with each other, thoroughly analyzed and set within the framework of current illiberal populist wave. Their inherently anti-liberal nature, questioning the very grounding of liberal democracy, should be viewed as a threat to the civic liberties and human freedoms as based on previously-held civic consensus on incontestability of the liberal-democratic political order.

Municipal periodicals, as a tool of political communication at the local level, have the potential to improve citizens‘ awareness and thus the quality of local administration. However, in the past they faced criticism because of the imbalance and favouring of the ruling coalitions, which the amendment of the Press Act of 2013 responded to. The article focuses on the analysis of the balance of the political content of the municipal periodicals of the regional towns in the Czech Republic during the 2014 election year. Emphasis is placed on testing the assumption that ruling coalition will be favoured in the content of municipal periodicals, not only before the municipal elections (Autumn 2014). By the quantitative content analysis of the text of the municipal periodicals the article verifies the balance of the frequency of the mentions about coalition and opposition parties, with objective consideration of the social importance of the parties. The article highlights the persistent problems with the continual imbalance in the political content of the municipal periodicals in favour of the municipal coalition and suggests a partial solution to the problems.