Why there is (almost) no Christian Democracy in post-communist Europe

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Grzymala-Busse

Compared to its West European counterparts, post-communist Christian Democracy is notable for its lack of success. Even in the most religious of post-communist democracies, no Christian Democratic (CD) party has claimed a plurality of the electorate. At the same time, there is a considerable range in average electoral support from 1990 to 2010, i.e. from 0.7 percent in Estonia to as high as 18.4 percent in Slovakia. The most successful CD parties have arisen in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Lithuania, and (with qualifications) in Macedonia. The reasons for this success lie not in popular religiosity, state–church conflict or alliances between CD parties and churches. Instead, where parties can point to a history of nation and state-building in the inter-war period, they receive an initial electoral boost from this historical legacy. Yet even these favourable historical reputations have transitory effects: by the second or third elections, the impact of inter-war support rapidly faded.

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 295-297
Author(s):  
Sergej A. Borisov

For more than twenty years, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences celebrates the Day of Slavic Writing and Culture with a traditional scholarly conference.”. Since 2014, it has been held in the young scholars’ format. In 2019, participants from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Togliatti, Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, and Rostov-on-Don, as well as Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania continued this tradition. A wide range of problems related to the history of the Slavic peoples from the Middle Ages to the present time in the national, regional and international context were discussed again. Participants talked about the typology of Slavic languages and dialects, linguo-geography, socio- and ethnolinguistics, analyzed formation, development, current state, and prospects of Slavic literatures, etc.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5355
Author(s):  
Vilém Pechanec ◽  
Ondřej Cudlín ◽  
Miloš Zapletal ◽  
Jan Purkyt ◽  
Lenka Štěrbová ◽  
...  

Global and regional biodiversity loss is caused by several drivers including urban development, land use intensification, overexploitation of natural resources, environmental pollution, and climate change. The main aim of our study was to adapt the GLOBIO3 model to the conditions of the Czech Republic (CR) to assess loss of naturalness and biodiversity vulnerability at the habitat level on a detailed scale across the entire CR. An additional aim was to assess the main drivers affecting the biodiversity of habitat types. The GLOBIO3 model was adapted to CZ-GLOBIO by adapting global to local scales and using habitat quality and naturalness data instead of species occurrence data. The total mean species abundance (MSA) index of habitat quality, calculated from the spatial overlay of the four MSA indicators by our new equation, reached the value 0.62. The total value of MSA for natural and near-natural habitats was found to be affected mainly by infrastructure development and fragmentation. Simultaneously, intensity of land use change and atmospheric nitrogen deposition contributed primarily to the low total value of MSA for distant natural habitats. The CZ-GLOBIO model can be an important tool in political decision making to reduce the impact of the main drivers on habitat biodiversity in the CR.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Miroslava Navrátilová ◽  
Markéta Beranová ◽  
Lucie Severová ◽  
Karel Šrédl ◽  
Roman Svoboda ◽  
...  

The aim of the presented article is to evaluate the impact of climate change on the sugar content of grapes in the Czech Republic during the period 2000–2019 through selected indicators on the basis of available secondary sources. Attention is focused on the developments in both the main wine-growing regions of Moravia and Bohemia. In the field of viticulture and wine-growing, the sugar content of grapes, as a basic parameter for the classification of wines, plays an important role. In the Czech Republic, the average sugar content of grapes has had a constantly growing trend. This trend is evident both in the wine-growing region of Bohemia and in the wine-growing region of Moravia. The impact of climate change, especially the gradual increase of average temperatures in the growing season, cannot be overlooked. It greatly affects, among other things, the sugar content of grapes. Calculations according to the Huglin Index and the Winkler Index were used to determine the relationship between climate and sugar content. These indexes summarize the course of temperatures during the entire vegetation period into a single numerical value. The results show that both indexes describe the effect of air temperature on sugar content in both wine regions of the Czech Republic in a statistically significant way. The Huglin Index shows a higher correlation rate. The Winkler Index proved to be less suitable for both areas. Alternatively, the Winkler Index calculated for a shorter growing season was tested, which showed a higher degree of correlation with sugar content, approaching the significance of the Huglin Index.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (No. 1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Skála ◽  
R. Vácha ◽  
J. Hofman ◽  
V. Horváthová ◽  
M. Sáňka ◽  
...  

Extensive soil sampling and screening assessment of ecosystem risks combined with a multidimensional statistical analysis were used to estimate and spatially characterize the ecosystem risks stemming from the contamination of floodplain soils in the Czech Republic. We proved structural differences in regional pollution patterns where different regional/local pollution sources led to various nature and extent of the environmental load of floodplain soils. The established spatial patterns helped reveal the areas where soils do not meet soil quality standards and where the ecosystem risks were elevated. Furthermore, the results allowed to establish priority contaminants of flood affected areas in various catchments in the Czech Republic. Combining both the magnitudes of estimated ecosystem risks and structural characteristics of pollution profiles, the highest estimated risks showed the localities with high contents of organochlorine pesticides, several samples connected to geochemical anomalies of metallogenic zones (deposits), and localities with a long history of industrial load. Since extreme weather events have recently become more frequent, our results highlight the importance of a continual monitoring of pollutant turnover in floodplain soils with a high flood frequency.


2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-44
Author(s):  
Roman David

Memories of wrongdoings are often viewed as an obstacle to reconciliation in divided societies. Is it due to the past or the present politics of the past? To examine the dilemma of essentialism versus presentism, this article investigates the impact of transitional justice on memories of wrongdoing. It theorizes that using different transitional justice strategies to deal with the same wrongdoing shapes memories in different ways. The theory is tested via vignette-based surveys in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which adopted distinct lustration laws. The results show that wrongdoing is viewed through lustration laws, reflecting present power constellations, not history.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
VÁCLAV ZÁMEČNÍK ◽  
VOJTĚCH KUBELKA ◽  
MIROSLAV ŠÁLEK

SummaryOnly a few studies have assessed the predation risk on artificially marked nests, or have examined ways of marking nests to avoid destruction by machinery. Until now, however, neither type of study has directly addressed this apparent trade-off experimentally. The impact of marking the nests of Northern Lapwing Vanellus vanellus with thin 2 m-long conspicuous bamboo poles with the top end highlighted with reflective red or orange spray has been tested for three years in two breeding areas of waders in the Czech Republic. A total of 52 pairs of nests on agricultural land, with each pair consisting of one marked nest and one unmarked reference counterpart nest, were monitored for 2004 nest-days until hatching, agricultural operations or failure. The results proved that marking itself does not result in increased nest predation. The nests found in the early incubation stage were under higher threat of depredation, irrespective of the presence of marking. Our results show that it is possible to find a finely-tuned trade-off in nest marking of ground-nesting birds between risk of damage by agricultural machinery and risk of increased nest predation. Our positive experience with Northern Lapwing, and episodically with three other wader species in the Czech Republic, suggests that this direct nest protection could be used effectively for a wider variety of ground-nesting birds.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Petra Baji ◽  
Márta Péntek ◽  
Imre Boncz ◽  
Valentin Brodszky ◽  
Olga Loblova ◽  
...  

In the past few years, several papers have been published in the international literature on the impact of the economic crisis on health and health care. However, there is limited knowledge on this topic regarding the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The main aims of this study are to examine the effect of the financial crisis on health care spending in four CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in comparison with the OECD countries. In this paper we also revised the literature for economic crisis related impact on health and health care system in these countries. OECD data released in 2012 were used to examine the differences in growth rates before and after the financial crisis. We examined the ratio of the average yearly growth rates of health expenditure expressed in USD (PPP) between 2008–2010 and 2000–2008. The classification of the OECD countries regarding “development” and “relative growth” resulted in four clusters. A large diversity of “relative growth” was observed across the countries in austerity conditions, however the changes significantly correlate with the average drop of GDP from 2008 to 2010. To conclude, it is difficult to capture visible evidence regarding the impact of the recession on the health and health care systems in the CEE countries due to the absence of the necessary data. For the same reason, governments in this region might have a limited capability to minimize the possible negative effects of the recession on health and health care systems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 476-488
Author(s):  
Tomáš Suk ◽  
Martin Štroner

This paper presents the results of over a year-long experiment dealing with a temperature measurement to calculate the theoretical effect of the atmosphere on the measured zenith angle in engineering surveying. The measurements were performed to determine the accurate and specific temperatures (temperature gradients), which can be recorded in different seasons in the low level of the atmosphere (up to 2 m above the ground, where most Engineering Surveying measurements take place) for the geographical area of Central Europe - specifically the Czech Republic. A numerical model was then applied to the resulting determined temperature gradients to calculate the path of the beam passing through an inhomogeneous atmosphere. From these values, the apparent vertical shifts caused by refraction in a given environment and time were finally determined.


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