Survey studies show that if governments are perceived to be performing poorly in terms of caring for their citizens, this can lead to increased support for public spending. This article builds on the literature on this ‘inside-the-box thinking’ by demonstrating that this effect is not alike between countries, and might be conditioned on welfare states being perceived as relatively free of corruption and locked into public welfare production. Using the 2006 ISSP Role of Government survey, this is tested on attitudes towards spending on public old
age pensions and healthcare, using descriptive statistics and multilevel modelling. The results show that in all 31 countries the perception that the government is performing poorly does lead to support for increased spending. This effect of perceived performance on attitudes
towards spending is, however, weakened by high levels of perceived corruption and strengthened by high levels of public spending. This shows that the effect of public performance on attitudes is conditioned by the context.

The article is focused on the Europeanization of political parties in the Czech Republic with special attention paid to two areas of research. First, based on an original dataset, the authors examine the salience of the European issue and identifies the context by which the issue is framed. Second, the attitudes of Czech political parties towards European integration over time are scrutinized. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the Czech experience. In contrast to the pre-accession period when European integration was presented mainly in the context of EU membership and the general direction of European integration, the membership period is typical by focus on EU policies and financial subsidies that the Czech Republic gets from the EU budget. European integration constitutes an issue cross-cutting the most important economical division in Czech party politics, with a high conflict potential influencing the dynamics of party competition in the country.

As it stands now, a consensus has been, more or less, established that the 2016 British referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union was held primarily due to the steadily increasing pressure of the Conservative parliamentary party’s hard Eurosceptic wing that had demanded it. This article deals with agenda setting within the Conservative Party, whilst applying the issue capture concept, first introduced by Nathaniel Copsey and Tim Haughton in 2014 in connection with their research into the
British debate on the EU and the European integration per se. The author argues that the issue capture phenomenon occurred also within the Conservative Party, when the minority group of its hard Eurosceptic members calling for an in/out referendum took near-control of the terms of the intra-party political debate and gradually put this issue through as a central point of the party’s programme. The article aims to answer the question, why it was the demand for an in/out referendum that became the central issue of the Conservative hard Eurosceptic wing.

The paper focuses on the interpretation of the causes, forms, and bearers of political change which, at the local level, led to the promotion of good governance, characterized by a high degree of transparency, openness, and efficiency. Conceptually, the research has drawn upon the complementary concepts of civil society, and focused on the small size towns (5 to 15 thousand) in the Czech Republic. A multiple-case methodology was applied, and it combined use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Among the most important findings was that (1) political elites were confronted with a civic environment which was imbued by negative and protest-like feedbacks, and nearly lacked the matter-of-fact civic feedbacks; that (2) the political factions performed many crucial both manifest and latent functions; that (3) parents with small children were among the most active civic groups when it comes to shaping public space; that (4) in terms of the general public, a clear correlation between the level of education, and a sense for plurality of opinions and interests was surprisingly not found; and (5) in the metropolitan suburban environment, compared with the smalltown environment, a higher concentration of opinion leaders resulted both in the greater frequency and intensity of protest participation, and into a more uneasy accumulation of political reputation. The results of analysis also verified the selection of the studied cases; they have been indeed characterized by a high degree of good governance attributes.

This article seeks to „reconstruct”, synoptically arrange and explain Aristotle’s conception of socio-political changes, coups, uprisings, revolutions and their prevention, which is „chaotically” (Pierre Pellegrin) presented in the book V. of Politics. It is argued that a number of ideas that are commonly associated with Modern Age authors, such as Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx and in the early 20th century Max Weber, for instance, appeared much earlier with Aristotle. Aristotle builds on a vast documentation and comes from an analysis of equalities and inequalities. His conception of socio-political development is not cyclical (which is the case of Artistotle’s great teacher Plato), but linear. Among political regimes Aristotle attributes a special position not only to democracy in ancient rendition, but above all to politeia in its own sense, which corresponds to our representative democracies to a large extent. builds on a vast documentation and comes from an analysis of equalities and inequalities. His conception of socio-political development is not cyclical (which is the case of Artistotle’s great teacher Plato), but linear. Among political regimes Aristotle attributes a special position not only to democracy in ancient rendition, but above all to politeia in its own sense, which corresponds to our representative democracies to a large extent.

The aim of this article is to clarify circumstances which are associated with dissolutions of local governments in the Czech Republic and holding new local elections. Two important sources are used to shed light on this problem: electoral data and a telephone survey in municipalities where one or more early elections were held from 2002. Such a comprehensive study has been missing up to now. The results show that, in most of the cases, new elections are caused by pragmatism of minorities in small governments with seven and less seats. Such small governments are the most common in the Czech Republic. Members of these minorities resign and cause early elections with the aim to get more power than they had after regular elections.