The Failure of the Participatory Democracy in the Czech Republic
Author(s)
Hadjiisky, Magdalena
Abstract
Following the breakdown of the Soviet system, the new East European elites faced the problem of defining and building democratic institutions. This problem was not a purely institutional one, however. During the transformation process, different conceptions of democracy appear and often become critical issues for political competition. Based on the Czech case, this article aims to understand how and why one particular concept of democracy becomes dominant during a process of regime change. Personified by the two Vaclavs, in the Czech political arena (Havel and Klaus), divergent perspectives on democracy exist in the Czech Republic, having concrete consequences for the practice of politics. These concepts, referred to here as participatory and majoritarian, dramatically differ in their perception of the role of the citizen in a liberal democracy. This article identifies and describes these two different concepts of democracy in the present and past Czech Republic. It explores the sociological conditions of their emergence to understand the failure of the participatory model of democracy with respect to the alternative, majoritarian, vision of democracy.
