Papers by Alena Macková
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Politologický časopis - Czech Journal of Political Science, 2013
Political communication has been undergoing a profound transformation in recent years following t... more Political communication has been undergoing a profound transformation in recent years following the appearance and rapid spread of new media. The use of new media, such as social networking sites and other internet platforms, is increasingly being exploited by all types of political actors, but particularly by those involved in electoral campaigns. Attempting to explore the presence of these trends in the Czech Republic, this paper focuses on the Senate and Regional Council electoral campaigns that took place in October 2012 in the Czech Republic, with the primary aim of comparing the differences in new media usage between candidates. A comprehensive analysis was based on a dataset obtained by monitoring the use of various types of new media by candidates, namely traditional websites, blogs, and the online social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The results show that younger candidates in regional elections engage in online campaigning more intensely than older candidates. The findings also demonstrate that Senate candidates use new media more extensively than candidates for the Regional Council. The most commonly used new media in both types of elections were traditional websites and the online social networking site Facebook. Regarding the candidates’ political affiliations, the analyses came to the conclusion that the usage of new media was generally similar for all major parties with one exception. The candidates from the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia used new media very sporadically and, moreover, most of them used no new media platforms at all in either type of election campaign.
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Medijske Studije, 2015
The article discusses qualitative research on the mundane civic practices of some Czechs, with a ... more The article discusses qualitative research on the mundane civic practices of some Czechs, with a specific focus on the role of new media. It works with a context-oriented approach in order to avoid media-centrism. Our research is focussed on the ways in which civic practices are structured by immediate and wider social and political contexts and how they are experienced by post-socialist citizens from villages and large cities. The role of new media and the place of civic practices in everyday life is analysed with respect to these contexts. The research based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 22 politically and publicly active citizens indicates that Czechs experience a similar crisis in relation to institutional politics as their counterparts in long established democracies and it reveals telltale differences between the social spaces of villages and cities both in participatory practices and in civic uses of new media. However, the study does not indicate a radical, new media-driven transformation of citizenship, rather it suggests subtle shifts in practices and a pragmatic mixing of face-to-face communication and traditional media (print, public address systems, noticeboards) with new communication technologies.
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The last few years have witnessed an intensified academic debate on the potential of new media in... more The last few years have witnessed an intensified academic debate on the potential of new media in politics in the Czech Republic. However, discussions on new media’s impact – democratic potential, mobilization of the electorate,
dialogue between citizens and politicians, etc. – tend to involve political parties rather than politicians as individual users. This chapter is mostly based on data analyzing the individual use of new media (and, specifically, social networking sites) by politicians. The aim of the chapter is to provide an insight into research that we conducted in 2012–14 on how Czech political actors used new media in four different elections. We believe that it is crucial to ask not only whether politicians have already taken up new media, but also how they use it. We need
to ask whether political communication changes substantially as a consequence of the adoption of new media. Our data suggest that regular online politiciancitizen dialogue is marginal. It appears as though contemporary politicians
perceive new media merely as a useful tool for campaigning rather than effective communication with citizens.
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Research on political speeches is commonly undertaken in countries where the president has a powe... more Research on political speeches is commonly undertaken in countries where the president has a powerful position, typically in the United States. In the Czech Republic, too, political speeches are an important instrument for influencing public opinion. Meanwhile, few politicians are so known for their fiercely held opinions on the European Union as former President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus; his speeches about the European Union are the subject of this article. Our research is based on quantitative and qualitative content analyses of the speeches posted on the former president’s website (http://www.klaus.cz) from 1995 until the end of his presidency in March 2013. Our goal was to identify the changes over time in how he spoke about the European Union, and whether and in what way his positions and vocabulary on the subject evolved.
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The paper presents a case study of the Czech online activist group Žít Brno. The group that chall... more 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.
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Patrut, B. (ed.) Social Media in Politics: Case Studies (2008-2013). Springer International Publishing, pp. 225-244., Apr 2014
This case study analyzes the use of social media in the campaign for the historically first direc... more This case study analyzes the use of social media in the campaign for the historically first direct presidential elections in the Czech Republic in January 2013. Following a brief outline of the political context and outcomes of the elections, this study explores and compares the strategies of campaign communication of the nine presidential candidates on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. Apart from mapping the dynamics of the campaign and the responsiveness of Facebook and Twitter users, we have used content analysis to examine basic formal characteristics of over one thousand messages posted on Facebook in the course of the campaign by the candidates and their teams. Additionally, this chapter also examines more closely the place of social media in the campaign of Karel Schwarzenberg, the eventual runner-up of the presidential race, whose team distanced all other candidates in both the extent as the level of sophistication of communication carried via the social networking sites. Overall, the presidential elections has revealed both the potential as well as limits of electoral mobilization through social networks, while at the same time it has demonstrated the continuing importance of more traditional means of campaign communication in the Czech Republic.
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This paper is concerned with research on the prolonging of children’s cohabitation with
parents... more This paper is concerned with research on the prolonging of children’s cohabitation with
parents. The transformation in patterns of child-parent cohabitation is seen as an indicator of the prolonging
of the transition to adulthood. The prolonging of cohabitation with parents is being rethought in the context
of broader social changes. On the basis of research on children’s leaving of the parental home and transition
to adulthood, the article discusses the absence of universal patterns in the leaving of the parental home and
its timing, regional differences, and its social and cultural conditionality. These regional specifics shape
particular patterns of transition to adulthood and related patterns of leaving the parental home. In general,
there are two distinct patterns of leaving the parental home (namely, the early Northern pattern and late
Southern pattern) which can help us understand and explain the observed prolonging transitions.
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Research on political speeches is often done in countries with strong presidential powers, typica... more Research on political speeches is often done in countries with strong presidential powers, typically in the USA. However, political speeches by presidents are also a critical method of influencing public opinion in the Czech Republic. Therefore this article is focused on the analysis of speeches of the former President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus. Our research is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Klaus’ speeches (thematic units are used as the unit of analysis) found on his website (www.klaus.cz) in the period from 1995 to the end of his presidency, March 2013 (N = 470). We aim to identify the changing structure of political issues in Klaus’ speeches and changes in Klaus’ position on those issues, and to uncover any characteristic features of his speeches (the use of personal pronouns, the role of the speaker, the tone of the speech, etc.).
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Political communication has been undergoing a profound transformation in recent years following t... more Political communication has been undergoing a profound transformation in recent years following the appearance and rapid spread of new media. The use of new media, such as social networking sites and other internet platforms, is increasingly being exploited by all types of political actors, but particularly by those involved in electoral campaigns. Attempting to explore the presence of these trends in the Czech Republic, this paper focuses on the Senate and Regional Council electoral campaigns that took place in October 2012 in the Czech Republic, with the primary aim of comparing the differences in new media usage between candidates. A comprehensive analysis was based on a dataset obtained by monitoring the use of various types of new media by candidates, namely traditional websites, blogs, and the online social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The results show that younger candidates in regional elections engage in online campaigning more intensely than older candidates. The findings also demonstrate that Senate candidates use new media more extensively than candidates for the Regional Council. The most commonly used new media in both types of elections were traditional websites and the online social networking site Facebook. Regarding the candidates’ political affiliations, the analyses came to the conclusion that the usage of new media was generally similar for all major parties with one exception. The candidates from the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia used new media very sporadically and, moreover, most of them used no new media platforms at all in either type of election campaign.
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Conference Presentations by Alena Macková
The paper presents findings from exploratory qualitative inquiry to the engagement and participat... more The paper presents findings from exploratory qualitative inquiry to the engagement and participation of the selected Czech citizens and from consequent quantitative survey of the Czech population. In general we are interested in how political and civic engagement and participation are experienced by post-socialist citizens and, in particular, what is the role of new media in the participatory practices. We employ context-oriented approach avoiding media-centric logic, building upon Nico Carpentier’s and Peter Dahlgren’s notion of participation and Maria Bakardjieva’s notion of subactivism connecting political participation with everyday life.
The qualitative inquiry is based on 22 semi-structured qualitative interviews where one half of the interviewees are residents of small towns and villages and the other half are residents of large cities. The politically and publicly active middle-class respondents were interviewed in April 2014 and the findings indicate that (1) the Czech respondents experience similar crisis in their attitude towards politics as their Western counterparts, (2) that we do not encounter radical, new-media-driven transformation of the citizenship and practices and (3) that the split of the sample into the inhabitants of ‘the village’ and ‘the city’ creates strong dichotomy revealing specifics of the two opposite types of social spaces. We suggest that the way the respondents employ traditional and new media in their public and civic practices is distinct in communitarian space of the village and in socially and physically dispersed space of the city.
In the survey (N=1998) conducted in November 2014 we follow the findings from qualitative inquiry and we test them on the representative sample of the Czech population. I.e. we look for significant differences in relation between engagement / participation, the role of (new) media in these practices and the types of the settlements.
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What are the motivations for participation in and through social media and, at the same time, for... more What are the motivations for participation in and through social media and, at the same time, for denial of such engagement? The numerous attempts to mobilize and empower the Czech citizens to participate in public and political processes via social media mostly work with simple assumptions: that people tend to be democratic and that the affordances of social media enable them to be publicly active. However, our research suggests that social media should be conceived only as a part of the story and that the motivations for the participation include more than the normative tendency to “be democratic”. The paper shows that the motivations are firmly situated in everyday contexts of the social actors and are strongly structured by social and cultural capital and by the performative nature of the mediated public and political spaces. Consequently to this, the paper offers a typology of the motivations and participatory agency of the Czech users of social media. The paper is based on qualitative and quantitative data from the ongoing research on old and new media, participation and the role of media in everyday life and on illustrative cases from the Czech Republic. On the theoretical level, the paper builds upon Carpentier's and Dahlgren's notion of participation, Bourdieu's theory of social and cultural capital and social constructivist approaches to everyday life.
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The paper is focused on particular repertoire of contention: on tactics of political (culture) ja... more The paper is focused on particular repertoire of contention: on tactics of political (culture) jamming that have spread on the Czech internet in last two years due to the increasing discontent with political situation and due to the continuous political crises. A potential of new media to stimulate political communication and to enhance civic participation has been examined in numerous theoretical and empirical studies: On the one hand, there is a growing body of work on non–institutionalized political actors using new media; on the other hand, there is a growing body of research evidences about new sources of political information grounded in practices such as jamming and satire. The paper maps these new online practices, these forms of activism used by individuals or small groups. As an illustrative case, the paper uses an analyze of “Žít Brno” (one of the activists’ groups started using jamming tactics extensively about two years ago on local, municipal level). The aim is to explicate the typical features of the internet-based, participatory-oriented political satire and its sources.
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Current upheaval of participatory audiences using for their political, cultural and generally pub... more Current upheaval of participatory audiences using for their political, cultural and generally public engagement so called social media is usually covered by concepts of civic journalism and online activism. More than anything else these concepts reflect thematic standpoints of the academic disciplines of media studies on the one hand political science on the other - with their emphasize on production and circulation of content (in case of media studies and the concept of civic journalism) or on political action (in case of political science and the concept of online activism). In the evidence-based presentation, we intend to suggest (1) that the field of audiences' agency covered by these concepts is more complex than these concepts imply and draws on more motivations than 'doing journalism' or 'doing democracy', (2) that these two concepts do not exclude each other since they in many cases describe the same agency from different theoretical position and (3) that the focus just on the 'journalistic' and 'activist' dimension of the agency is simplifying and makes some segments of the participatory audiences simply invisible. (4) Moreover, we will argue that the participatory audiences share some more general features that go beyond the prevailing conceptual frameworks. The presentation is based on data from six qualitative pilot inquiries that were conducted on Masaryk University in 2012-2013 and dealt with Czech and Slovak new media audiences and specifically with issues of activism, civic journalism and subcultural life.
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Research report by Alena Macková
Přehledová zpráva z terénního kvantitativní výzkumu účastníků blokády pochodu krajní pravice (Brn... more Přehledová zpráva z terénního kvantitativní výzkumu účastníků blokády pochodu krajní pravice (Brno, 1. 5. 2015) shrnuje vybrané deskriptivní ukazatele charakterizující respondenty výzkumu.
Šetření vedli Alena Macková a Jakub Macek z Fakulty sociálních studií. Výzkum je součástí série studií, v nichž se autoři zabývají rolí nových a tradičních médií v občanské a politické participaci.
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Papers by Alena Macková
dialogue between citizens and politicians, etc. – tend to involve political parties rather than politicians as individual users. This chapter is mostly based on data analyzing the individual use of new media (and, specifically, social networking sites) by politicians. The aim of the chapter is to provide an insight into research that we conducted in 2012–14 on how Czech political actors used new media in four different elections. We believe that it is crucial to ask not only whether politicians have already taken up new media, but also how they use it. We need
to ask whether political communication changes substantially as a consequence of the adoption of new media. Our data suggest that regular online politiciancitizen dialogue is marginal. It appears as though contemporary politicians
perceive new media merely as a useful tool for campaigning rather than effective communication with citizens.
parents. The transformation in patterns of child-parent cohabitation is seen as an indicator of the prolonging
of the transition to adulthood. The prolonging of cohabitation with parents is being rethought in the context
of broader social changes. On the basis of research on children’s leaving of the parental home and transition
to adulthood, the article discusses the absence of universal patterns in the leaving of the parental home and
its timing, regional differences, and its social and cultural conditionality. These regional specifics shape
particular patterns of transition to adulthood and related patterns of leaving the parental home. In general,
there are two distinct patterns of leaving the parental home (namely, the early Northern pattern and late
Southern pattern) which can help us understand and explain the observed prolonging transitions.
Conference Presentations by Alena Macková
The qualitative inquiry is based on 22 semi-structured qualitative interviews where one half of the interviewees are residents of small towns and villages and the other half are residents of large cities. The politically and publicly active middle-class respondents were interviewed in April 2014 and the findings indicate that (1) the Czech respondents experience similar crisis in their attitude towards politics as their Western counterparts, (2) that we do not encounter radical, new-media-driven transformation of the citizenship and practices and (3) that the split of the sample into the inhabitants of ‘the village’ and ‘the city’ creates strong dichotomy revealing specifics of the two opposite types of social spaces. We suggest that the way the respondents employ traditional and new media in their public and civic practices is distinct in communitarian space of the village and in socially and physically dispersed space of the city.
In the survey (N=1998) conducted in November 2014 we follow the findings from qualitative inquiry and we test them on the representative sample of the Czech population. I.e. we look for significant differences in relation between engagement / participation, the role of (new) media in these practices and the types of the settlements.
Research report by Alena Macková
Šetření vedli Alena Macková a Jakub Macek z Fakulty sociálních studií. Výzkum je součástí série studií, v nichž se autoři zabývají rolí nových a tradičních médií v občanské a politické participaci.
dialogue between citizens and politicians, etc. – tend to involve political parties rather than politicians as individual users. This chapter is mostly based on data analyzing the individual use of new media (and, specifically, social networking sites) by politicians. The aim of the chapter is to provide an insight into research that we conducted in 2012–14 on how Czech political actors used new media in four different elections. We believe that it is crucial to ask not only whether politicians have already taken up new media, but also how they use it. We need
to ask whether political communication changes substantially as a consequence of the adoption of new media. Our data suggest that regular online politiciancitizen dialogue is marginal. It appears as though contemporary politicians
perceive new media merely as a useful tool for campaigning rather than effective communication with citizens.
parents. The transformation in patterns of child-parent cohabitation is seen as an indicator of the prolonging
of the transition to adulthood. The prolonging of cohabitation with parents is being rethought in the context
of broader social changes. On the basis of research on children’s leaving of the parental home and transition
to adulthood, the article discusses the absence of universal patterns in the leaving of the parental home and
its timing, regional differences, and its social and cultural conditionality. These regional specifics shape
particular patterns of transition to adulthood and related patterns of leaving the parental home. In general,
there are two distinct patterns of leaving the parental home (namely, the early Northern pattern and late
Southern pattern) which can help us understand and explain the observed prolonging transitions.
The qualitative inquiry is based on 22 semi-structured qualitative interviews where one half of the interviewees are residents of small towns and villages and the other half are residents of large cities. The politically and publicly active middle-class respondents were interviewed in April 2014 and the findings indicate that (1) the Czech respondents experience similar crisis in their attitude towards politics as their Western counterparts, (2) that we do not encounter radical, new-media-driven transformation of the citizenship and practices and (3) that the split of the sample into the inhabitants of ‘the village’ and ‘the city’ creates strong dichotomy revealing specifics of the two opposite types of social spaces. We suggest that the way the respondents employ traditional and new media in their public and civic practices is distinct in communitarian space of the village and in socially and physically dispersed space of the city.
In the survey (N=1998) conducted in November 2014 we follow the findings from qualitative inquiry and we test them on the representative sample of the Czech population. I.e. we look for significant differences in relation between engagement / participation, the role of (new) media in these practices and the types of the settlements.
Šetření vedli Alena Macková a Jakub Macek z Fakulty sociálních studií. Výzkum je součástí série studií, v nichž se autoři zabývají rolí nových a tradičních médií v občanské a politické participaci.
Keywords: Political communication, social networking sites, Facebook, politicians, election, new media, political participation, online participation