This paper focuses on the role of social class in shaping party choice in the 2025 Czech parliamentary elections and situates these findings within a broader longitudinal comparison covering the period from 1990 to 2025. Using post-election survey data from ten national elections, we analyze the relationship between social class and party choice through multinomial regression models and summary indices of class voting. The study addresses two main research questions. First, it investigates whether class voting declined during the 2010s in connection with the rise of new political parties and whether it re-emerged in recent elections. Second, it examines the extent to which new parties have absorbed the electorates of traditional parties and reshaped class-based patterns of electoral support. The findings contribute to debates on dealignment and realignment by assessing whether the transformation of the Czech party system led to a weakening of class–party linkages or to their reconfiguration. Overall, the paper provides the most comprehensive longitudinal account of class voting in the Czech Republic to date and offers new insights into the changing social foundations of party competition in a volatile political context.
This article examines how historical narratives were mobilised in televised pre-election debates preceding the 2025 Czech parliamentary election and what political functions they performed within electoral competition. Drawing on theories of memory politics, symbolic politics, populist communication, and framing, the study conceptualises references to the past as strategic discursive instruments shaping contemporary political conflict. The analysis is based on a qualitative discourse analysis of debates broadcast by major Czech media outlets during the 2025 campaign.The findings demonstrate that history functioned primarily as a mechanism of emotional and moral mobilisation. Political actors framed issues such as migration, relations with the European Union, democracy, and national identity through analogies to normatively charged historical experiences, particularly the communist regime, the democratic breakthrough of 1989, and the Soviet invasion of 1968. Four dominant mechanisms were identified: analogical comparison, warnings against repeating past mistakes, the heroisation of democratic milestones, and relativising reinterpretations of historical parallels. These strategies moralised electoral competition and intensified value-based polarisation by transforming programmatic disagreements into existential conflicts over the direction of the state.
This article examines the electoral performance of mayors in the 2025 Czech general election, focusing on candidates from parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies. Amid the growing personalisation of politics, mayors are often seen as valuable assets to party lists due to their local visibility and perceived competence. Using a dataset of 2,052 candidates, we compare the electoral performance of mayors and deputy mayors against other high-status professions (medical doctors, lawyers, teachers) and incumbent MPs. Methodologically, the study employs a probit model to estimate the probability of election and quantile regression to analyse preferential vote gains relative to ballot position. The results confirm that, while mayors possess a statistically significant electoral advantage over the average candidate, they do not outperform medical doctors or incumbent MPs. The analysis further reveals significant variations across political parties and regions. While the STAN movement fielded the most mayors, their individual electoral impact was often surpassed by that of other professionals within the party. Conversely, the populist ANO movement successfully leveraged deputy mayors. The findings suggest that while municipal experience remains a key recruitment channel, the "mayoral bonus" is not limitless.
The article examines the politicisation of foreign and European policy in the 2025 Czech parliamentary elections through an analysis of party narratives articulated in electoral manifestos and campaign discourse. The 2025 campaign was marked by a deliberate effort of incumbent parties to increase its salience and to frame geopolitical orientation and EU membership as existential choices. Building on the literature on the Europeanisation of Czech foreign policy and on party-based foreign policy narratives, the study analyses manifestos of all parliamentary parties (ANO, AUTO, Pirates, SPD, STAN, and Together) and one relevant extra-parliamentary actor (Enough!). Using a qualitative narrative approach, the article identifies dominant narrative patterns and maps their alignment with established ideational strands such as liberal internationalism, sovereigntism, Euro-optimism, and Euroscepticism. The findings demonstrate a clear incumbents–opposition divide. Government parties articulated coherent internationalist and Euro-optimist narratives, combining Europeanist and Atlanticist trajectories, whereas opposition parties offered more heterogeneous but generally reactive and Eurosceptic visions. The article contributes to comparative research on the domestic politicisation of foreign policy and the role of party narratives in structuring electoral competition.
This innovative article maps the digital infrastructure of the nine main parties in the Czech party system – ODS, KDU-CSU, TOP09 (all part of SPOLU), ANO, STAN, Pirates, SPD, Motorists and Stačilo! – in the month preceding the 2025 general election. By digital infrastructure we mean their formalized online presence over a range of online platforms, websites, and social media portals. Methodologically, this article performs qualitative coding for eight analytical categories, looking at these parties not only through their main pages, but also through the digital platforms of their best-known politicians and a sample of local/regional branches. By performing this mapping, we reconstructed the main features in their political communication and messaging towards the electorate at large. What the data reveals is the degree of personalism, professionalism, negative messaging, and issues of focus of the different parties and their candidates. Coming now to the research question, we wanted to investigate the degree of variation between parties in the level of development of their digital infrastructure and in their style of “platform politics” and see if we could find patterns between parties according to their characteristics. To do so, we formulated a series of clear hypotheses expecting the effect of party type, electoral size, internal centralization, and incumbency on the digital infrastructure of Czech parties. The findings do not fully support our expectations but point to a crisis of traditional parties in building digital infrastructures, and a partial success for some of the new parties. Overall, this article promises to change our way of thinking about the online presence of Czech political parties.
