Democracy, Civic Society

In an April survey, the Public Opinion Research Centre of focused, inter alia, on the involvement of people in the political and economic life of the society, and on membership in various organisations. We first asked the respondents whether they, apart from voting, have been involved in political life during the last ten years. 16% of them were engaged in politics on communal level, as opposed to only 2% participating in politics on higher - regional and nationwide - levels.

Survey results reveal that the Czech public has somewhat ambivalent attitudes towards existing political and economic doctrines. In addition to there being the majority unequivocal approval of general liberal views (‘the state should not limit individuals, it should only create conditions for the exercise of their rights and freedoms’; the state should give businesses as much independence as possible’; ‘the scope of private property must not be limited in any way’), there is also a broad positive consensus.

Survey respondents said that they took the greatest interest in local affairs (two thirds of those polled were very or partly interested), followed by an interest in the economic situation of our country (59.9% of those polled were very or partly interested) and an interest in information from abroad (56.7%). However, this information was not specified as ‘political information’; the question was posed generally.

What do respondents think about the functioning of our political system and how do they evaluate the current political system in comparison with the pre-1989 one? The people polled used an evaluating scale from 1 (the system is functioning very poorly) to 10 (the system is functioning very well) to evaluate individual political systems. The pre-November 1989 political system scored an average rating of 4.