The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled heated discussions and intensified polarization in the exchange of opinions. Due to strict government restrictions, including a hard lockdown, much of this debate ...took place online. In this study, we examine how Czechs engaged in political discussions on Facebook during the pandemic. This research looks into the occurrence of incivility and intolerance and the similarities/contrasts with normatively desirable discursive features. We also focus on the perception of differences between various types of antinormative expressions among participants in online discussions and their roles. We use a mixed-method approach: a quantitative content analysis of comments on the Facebook pages of two of the Czech Republic’s most popular news media outlets (i.e., public service television, ČT24, and commercial television, TN.CZ) and two top Czech politicians (Andrej Babiš and Tomio Okamura); and qualitative interviews with 20 participants collected during the Springs of 2021. Data were downloaded by Facepager during the hard lockdown in the Czech Republic (March and April 2021), and the final sample consisted of 1,792 comments. We reveal that incivility, when expressed with a justified opinion, was less likely to directly attack other commenters within the thread. We also observe differences in the amount of incivility in politicians’ pages compared to the news media. Incivility has increased over time since the hard lockdown started. We address the implications of different conditions in which incivility and intolerance occurred and their impact on deliberative democracy.
The article deals with selected theoretical and empirical aspects of inheritance law after enactment of Act No. 89/2012 Sb., Civil Code and new aspects of inheritance proceedings brought about to the ...proceedings due to Act No. 89/2012 Sb., Civil Code. These new aspects culminate in questions of reflection of authonomy of freewill in succession law in inheritance proceedings, and the respect of the freewill of the deceased in this proceedings, transition of debts to successors from the deceased and litigation of succession.
Even though social networking sites create a unique online public space for the exchange of opinions, only a small share of citizens participate in online discussions. Moreover, research has depicted ...current online discussions as highly uncivil, hostile, and polarized, and the number of heated discussions has escalated in the last two years because of health, social, and security crises. This study investigates the perceived barriers to participation in Facebook discussions, focusing on two topics: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War. It explores the role that the negativity of these online discussions has on participation. To investigate the perspectives of users and their personal experiences with online discussions in times of crisis, we apply a qualitative research method and interviews with participants. We collected and analyzed 50 semi-structured interviews with Czech Facebook users who participated in discussions during the spring of 2021 (i.e., Covid-19) and the spring of 2022 (i.e., Russo-Ukrainian War). The results show that, after initial mobilization at the beginning of the pandemic, the crisis reinforced several crucial barriers to participation in discussions due to the perceived persistence of polarization (e.g., the spread of disinformation, the bipolar character of discussions, negative perception of opponents), which subsequently spread to other areas and issues. The data also implies that these barriers tend to demobilize less active participants, those who do not have strong opinions, and participants who think the subject matter is not worth the heated exchange of opinions.
In the context of constantly changing media communication and the behavior of different actors engaging it, our paper seeks to map current transformations and adaptations to changes within Czech ...audiences with a special interest in their media routines and strategies for choosing media sources. As it still remains rather unclear how the post-televisual audience members decide regarding content sources, platforms or services, our main aim is to discover on what basis audiences decide to use or avoid either illegal or non-authorized content sources or legal or paid services. To do so, we examined two datasets, namely semi-structured interviews with audiences and survey on Czech adult population. As the Czech industry media market is rather small and conservative with notable changes in online sector largely occurring within the last five years, Czech audiences represent an important and unique population for the study of differences between paying and non-paying post-televisual audiences.
The last few years have witnessed an intensified academic debate on the potential of online social networking sites (SNSs) in the Czech Republic. However, the ensuing academic discussions focused ...mostly on the SNS pages of political parties. Politicians in particular have recently become the focus of attention in the shift towards research exploring the use of SNSs. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the role of Facebook in the communication of parties and candidates during the Czech parliamentary elections in 2013. We analyse the adoption of Facebook as a mobilization tool by seven parties as well as by 200 individual deputies, looking for similarities and differences in terms of the adoption, strategy and engagement of users. Although party influence seems to be a significant predictor of Facebook adoption, our data also indicate that using other digital channels increases the chances of higher engagement on Facebook at the individual level.
The paper presents a case study of the Czech online activist group Žít Brno. The group that challenges local representatives and employs tactics of political satire, parody and culture jamming, ...evolved from a spontaneous one-off event to an ongoing political project and eventually became an institutionalized political actor. The case study, based on interviews with group members, content analysis of the project website, longitudinal observation of the group's activities and other additional material, enables us to research the limits and the potential of online tactics and the way online practices are intertwined with a more traditional repertoire of collective action. Building on debates about online political participation and the broadening concept of the political, we interpret the group's protest as a reaction to the crisis of institutionalized local politics and we discuss the actual role of new media in such a protest. The conclusion is that online protest and new media, despite their criticized action-less character, could enable a functional bridge to “real” politics but at the same time they do not play an exclusive role in successful protest politics and have to be interpreted within the context of a particular political action.
This article introduces and validates a Political Antagonism Scale (PAS) aimed at capturing politically motivated antagonism among people in survey research. Recent trends indicate a rise in ...politically motivated polarization across various countries. This polarization often transcends mere ideological distance, fostering an identity-based “Us” versus “Them” political perspective. Consequently, this transforms the traditional agonistic political competition into a deeply adversarial antagonistic relationship, wherein political counterparts are viewed as enemies. Such conflict dynamics may have serious consequences for democratic politics and should be examined by scholars of political polarization across different political contexts and at different time points. However, a comprehensive survey tool addressing this form of polarization has been lacking. The PAS is designed to capture the complex nature of political antagonism and target individual antagonization towards their political outgroups on the level of social groups, political elites, the media, and everyday life. In addition, we present a regression model identifying potential sources of political antagonism. Our findings highlight the significant association between political antagonization and a prevailing sense of ontological insecurity.
This paper analyses the contemporary public debate about vaccination, and medical knowledge more broadly, in the context of social media. The study is focused on the massive online debate prompted by ...the Facebook status of the digital celebrity Mark Zuckerberg, who posted a picture of his two‐month‐old daughter, accompanied by a comment: ’Doctor's visit – time for vaccines!’ Carrying out a qualitative analysis on a sample of 650 comments and replies, selected through systematic random sampling from an initial pool of over 10,000 user contributions, and utilising open and axial coding, we empirically inform the theoretical discussion around the concept of the reflexive patient and introduce the notion of multi‐layered reflexivity. We argue that the reflexive debate surrounding this primarily medical problem is influenced by both biomedical and social scientific knowledge. Lay actors therefore discuss not only vaccination, but also its political and economic aspects as well as the post‐truth information context of the debate. We stress that the reflexivity of social actors related to the post‐truth era re‐enters and influences the debate more than ever. Furthermore, we suggest that the interconnection of different layers of reflexivity can either reinforce certainty or deepen the ambiguity and uncertainty of reflexive agents.
This study focuses on the communication styles of male and female candidates on Facebook during the 2017 parliamentary election campaign in the Czech Republic. It tests the assumption that female ...candidates engage in a more personal and interactive style of communication than male candidates. The Czech Republic provides a hard test of this hypothesis given that the electoral system poses weak incentives for candidates to run personal campaigns and the political culture exhibits strong gender stereotypes. We analyze the use of personalized content, technological disclosure, and interactivity in 1637 Facebook posts created by 227 candidates. The findings are in line with previous research and show that female candidates did not significantly differ from male candidates in the way they communicated on social networking sites (SNSs). The study extends our understanding of how communication styles are used in a political context. It suggests that politics presents a specific context which motivates politicians to pursue communication styles that overturn traditional stereotypes.
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