Media and Information Literacy of Students – Skills and Challenges in the Context of Political Preferences

The main purpose of this article is to present the link between the level of media and information literacy (MIL) and political preferences of Polish students based on empirical research. MIL is a key issue for today’s societies as it equips citizens with the skills needed to use various media and information channels and exercise their basic human rights. Phenomena such as post-truth, the way people are more inclined to accept arguments based on emotions and beliefs than facts, disinformation and fake news are an important context and subject of ongoing scientific discussions. Keeping in mind the limitations of self-report methods, the authors combine the elements of students’ self-assessment with the questions that test their theoretical knowledge and competences related to recognizing fake news. The research sample consists of 870 students of social sciences and journalism. The results of the research provide detailed knowledge about the level of MIL as well as political preferences of students. By that, authors hope to contribute to the global scientific discussion, offering their research conducted in the context of the declining quality of democracy in Poland.

The Activity of Political Science Researchers in Public Debate: Case Study of Poland

This article has several aims. With the help of the original survey data, the article will analyse how Polish political scientists perceive the presence of members of their own scholarly discipline in public debate as desirable and what are their opinions on it. Secondly, the article determines to what extent the political changes initiated in 2015 have affected the general approach to media appearances, and assessments of their content and frequency. Thirdly, an attempt will also be made to determine to what extent the political convictions of political science researchers are correlated with the general assessment of the presence of researchers in public debate, the choice of media in which they are active, and the frequency of their appearances.

Culture of Communication of Slovak Politicians

The term political culture involves a wide range of contexts and evokes a different spectrum of ideas, opinions, and definitions. Nowadays, perhaps slightly more than ever, we encounter views and statements that refer to the low level of political culture in our country. Many times, these are declarations that apply not only to specific political parties or politicians, but also to citizens, or even to the entire nation, which is (often by itself) described as having no political culture. And this notion, unfortunately, also harmfully affects the formation of our national identity as such; how we perceive ourselves, what patterns we adopt, and what standards we accept. In our paper, we focus on the culture of the Slovak political communication, while paying special attention to the linguistic utterances of selected representatives of the Slovak political scene. In this context, the language will act as a tool for communication between political representatives themselves, between political officials and citizens, but also as a tool of discussion on politics among people.

Political Preferences of QCA Methods Institutes? A Comment on the Availability and Gender Gap Disparity Problems

In this research note, I examine a set of two interrelated questions about the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) methods institutes. First, I assembled and analyzed a novel dataset that tracks every QCA related training worldwide from 2002 to 2018. My examination finds that although QCA trainings are becoming more popular in Europe, the US is still the single most frequent host country for such events. Secondly, I examine the extent to which gender gap exists among QCA instructors. My findings show that female QCA instructors are severely under-represented, which likely limits their academic and professional opportunities. Thus, the QCA research community appears to be marked by the same structural challenges to diversity and gender equality as other areas of political science. Overall, this paper should of interest to scholars interested in the impact of academic infrastructures on future research trajectories as well as those concerned about gender equality in academia.

Prime Ministers on Twitter

The aim of this paper is to analyse Twitter activity of Prime Ministers of Poland and of the Czech Republic, Mateusz Morawiecki and Andrej Babiš respectively, during the 2019 European Parliament election campaign with the special focus on their ways of creating, imposing and reproducing the campaign discourse. It examines especially the person-alization of the election campaign, namely using the election-related activities to promote their image. Also, the im-portance of hashtags as a strategy for building discursive styles is explored and ways of using political pretexts e.g. the Europe Day to introduce election themes are compared. In this context the answer to the following question pre-sents itself as a research challenge: to what extent PMs’ tweets impact the course and the dynamics of the campaign and to what extent it is just dry information, a press commentary?

Regime Preferences in Communist Czechoslovakia and the Narrative on the Slovak National Uprising

Most of the participants in the Slovak National Uprising (SNP) were fighting for the ideals of democracy and freedom, for the defeat of fascism and Nazism and for the new Czechoslovak Republic with equal status for the Slovak people within it. They could not have foreseen that communist totalitarianism would be established after the war, one that would try to use the Uprising as a precursor for the socialist revolution (Fremal 2010: 359). The Communist Party, with the support of historians, utilised the legacy of the SNP to justify its political actions. Czechoslovak identity was also constructed through the image of the SNP, whose annual celebrations provided the communists with the opportunity to interpret the legacy of the SNP in various forms. This work deals with the way the communists interpreted the SNP in order to convince the public that this was a people's Uprising intended to lead to social equality and the eventual acceptance of communism in Czechoslovakia in the years 1947,1948 and 1954.

Electoral Defeat and Party Change: When do Parties Adapt?

Electoral defeat has sometimes been called the mother of party change, but is this reputation warranted? In this paper we investigate whether party characteristics such as government status, party systemic origins, or ideological family affect how parties respond to defeat. Examining 73 parties in 28 countries, considering party efforts to change their leadership, their programs and their organizations, we conclude that only systemic origin (post-communist vs. West European countries) is a relevant factor affecting depth of party change. Parties take some corrective actions after electoral defeat, however, they are not likely to be a wholesale reforms. Thus, it would be more accurate to describe electoral defeat as a midwife of a party change, not as its mother.

Money for Nothing? Financing the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Nomination Campaigns

The aim of the paper is to analyze the relationship between campaign money and winning the 2016 and 2020 presidential nominations in the United States. While in the last two decades of the twentieth century candidates who raised most money almost always became major party nominees, the record is mixed for presidential cycles 2004-2012. By comparing various dimensions of campaign finance, including activities of candidates' campaign committees and outside groups, the Author demonstrates that while successful fundraising, resulting in dozens of millions of dollars at the disposal of candidates, seems necessary to run a competitive campaign, raising the most money is no longer pre-requisite for becoming major party presidential nominee.

Did Polish Bishops Support Andrzej Duda in the Presidential Campaign in 2020? Analysis of Institutional Messages of the Polish Episcopal Conference

The aim of the article is to increase the cognitive value in the area of political communication of Polish bishops during the presidential campaign in Poland in 2020, in particular to answer the question whether the Polish Episcopal Conference supported President Andrzej Duda politically in his candidacy for re-election. The research applied the analysis and synthesis method supplemented with elements of hermeneutics. The Polish Episcopal Conference remained an entity not politically involved at the level of institutional communiqués and did not support any of the candidates applying for the office of President of the Republic of Poland in 2020. The issue for further political and media research remains that of complementary forms of communication of the ecclesial institution and the way of expressing one's own electoral preferences, for example through the Catholic media.

Deliberative Democracy: The Case of Slovenia

In Europe and across the world, many countries are turning to deliberative democracy to reform their constitutions, and in many others this question is high on the political agenda. Such transformation also shuffles quite radically the role of the citizenry regarding constitutional changes. Traditionally such changes are the sole responsibility of elected officials in collaboration with experts. With the deliberative turn, many more actors may be involved in the designing of constitutions, from citizens both individually and collectively in the forms of informal associations to various civil society organisations. The main aim of this paper is to analyse potential of deliberative democracy in Slovenian national setting, therefore authors are analysing a) framework of constitution making dynamics and b) most successful deliberative democratic tools and opportunities developed so far on both national and sub-national levels of the Slovenian government. As deliberative democracy is well known political phenomenon, we will start not by yet another theoretical pandemonium, but with less-known Slovenian contribution to the global development of deliberative model.