České politické strany v politickém prostoru

Abstract

Parties in the Policy Space: The Case of the Czech Republic Abstract: This article is based on a top-down approach to investigating po- litical interactions between parties and voters and introduces the policy-space perspective into this approach. Its basic premise is as follows: through the application of categories of the proximity/distance of political actors, con- fl icts latently or manifestly present in a party system can be represented in the policy space. Mapping the policy space traces these relationships and helps to answer the question: What are the positions of political parties on the se- lected political topics? After providing an overview of existing scholarship on policy-space perspective in Czech politics, the article introduces and discusses a substantive and methodological decision that must be made in this type of research. The empirical part of the article replicates key aspects of Kenneth Be- noit's and Michael Laver's study mapping policy spaces in modern democra- cies. The article employs as yet unpublished data from a late 2008 expert panel on the political positions of Czech parliamentary political parties. On the basis of this data the article seeks to answer the following research questions: What is the character of the Czech policy space? What is the relationship between substantive policy dimensions and the synthetic right-left dimension? What additional potential does mapping the policy space offer in comparison with research based on other premises?