Konflikt v hlasování Poslanecké sněmovny PČR (1993–2013)

The paper explores the legislative unity of government and opposition blocs in the Czech Chamber of Deputies over a period of twenty years. As voting unity is usually rather low in the Czech Republic, temporarily high concentrations of the respective blocks’ votes are linked to higher rates of conflict between the government and opposition. I use the Rice and UNITY indices to compare average unity scores of individual cabinets and also explorative time series of unity vectors in order to analyse bloc concentration, success rate, and increased conflict. The outcomes are relevant as both a case study and a methodological observation: (1) Broad differences in the logic of interaction are confirmed (e.g. caretaker cabinets show less conflict than standard cabinets). Although no universal trend (e.g. a transition from consensual to conflictual practice) is found, the Czech opposition became more concentrated and resorted to the tactics of serial blocking in the second decade; thus, a major change of behaviour occurred after all. (2) The Rice and UNITY indices correlate considerably; UNITY’s discrimination capacity is not distorted significantly despite the nature of equilibria in the Chamber. Moreover; the UNITY index is able easily to distinguish contested votes which are not detectable by the Rice index alone.