•The research on mental health problems and related help seeking among Ukrainian war refugees is almost non-existent.•This study provides insights into the prevalence of depression and anxiety in ...this population group, and it helps to understand their self-recognition and help seeking behaviour.•High prevalence of moderate or more severe depression and anxiety symptoms points to a significant mental health crisis among Ukrainian war refugees.•The lack of recognition of these problems and the alarmingly low rates of seeking mental health support demonstrate a need for mental health literacy programs targeted specifically towards this population.•Such programs should promote awareness, destigmatize mental health issues, equip individuals with knowledge and skills for increasing their mental health wellbeing and resilience, and empower them to seek the adequate support when necessary.
We aimed to screen Ukrainian war refugees (UWR) in Czechia for depression and anxiety, and to assess their recognition of personal mental health problems and related help-seeking.
We conducted a cross-sectional study on a sample of UWR in Czechia. We used PHQ-8 and GAD-7 to screen for depression and anxiety, SELF-I to assess the recognition of respondents' own mental health problems, and a set of questions regarding mental health-related help-seeking.
Our sample consisted of 1,347 UWR. More than 41 % of respondents screened positively for moderate or severe depression and more than 23 % for moderate or severe anxiety. Self-recognition of mental health as well as help-seeking was very low among those who screened positively for moderate or severe depression or anxiety.
Even those UWR who report severe symptoms do not identify themselves as potentially having mental health issues and are not seeking help.
The research on coalition formation has used the abundance of local-level data to test the classical theories of coalition formation. I take the classical theories as a baseline and supplement them ...with additional factors related to how political agents are embedded in the local community. In particular, I investigate how the social capital of elected councillors attained in local football clubs and the membership bases of local party branches affect coalition formation. The results of conditional logit models show that coalitions are more likely to be formed between parties whose elected councillors are members of a local football club. In addition, a higher share of elected councillors who are not party members is associated with preference for oversized coalitions. This indicates that when local party branches are not sure about their own and their coalition partners' unity, they prefer to ensure coalition survival by including an additional party.
Literature provides four basic theories to explain regional election results and how they differ from national patterns: authority of regional governments, ethnic or linguistic cleavages, congruence ...of national and regional electoral systems, and second-order election effects. The second-order national election theory explains why regional elections exhibit lower turnout levels, why government parties lose voter support, and why opposition, minor, and new parties gain support. While second-order election theory provides the dominant explanation for countries with low regional power, we argue in favour of an additional explanation based on incumbency effects on parties' electoral support. We test the explanations on Czech regional and national election data for the years 2000-2020. The results attest to a strong effect of regional governorship, with a bonus of 5 percentage points for parties whose governors run for re-election. Parties also receive another bonus when national-level MPs and local mayors are present on the ballot.
The literature on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected vote choice provides evidence of both ‘rally-’round-the-flag’ effects and the influence of perceived government pandemic performance. However, ...this evidence concerns short-term effects. Much less is known about how COVID-19-related economic changes and government measures in response to the pandemic have affected vote choice over a longer period. Using a post-election survey from the Czech Republic fielded in October 2021, we examine the effect of pandemic-related issues on support for governing parties in an election one and a half years after the pandemic started, focusing on a general evaluation of the economy and of government pandemic performance and on individual economic and health-related experiences of COVID-19. First, a negative health-related experience of COVID-19 did not affect vote choice. Second, only business loss negatively affected governmental support; job loss had no effect. Third, retrospective evaluations of the national economy and government pandemic performance affected vote choice, while retrospective evaluation of one’s personal economic situation did not. Fourth, the majority of the above-mentioned effects drove support for the dominant governing party (ANO) and only in a limited way support for the junior cabinet partner (ČSSD).
We provide a detailed case study showing how social network analysis allows scholars to detect an event affecting the entire historical network under consideration and identify the responsible ...actors. We study the middle 13th century in Czech lands, where a rigid political structure of noble families surrounding the monarchs led to the uprising of part of the nobility. Having collected data on approximately 2,400 noblemen from 576 charters, we attempted to uncover social network features pointing to the rebellion and expose the noblemen who joined it. We observed, among other such quantifiable features, assortativity increasing before and resetting to random after the rebellion, a drop in the number of stable connections and subgraph similarity between yearly networks and regional titles (burgraves) rising in centrality above royal court officials in that period. The presented methods can be directly translated to other person-document data of comparable or larger sizes, and we hope it can help detect or disambiguate the timing of similar major events and the roles of people involved in them.
