Jan Kovar

• Ph.D.
• Head of Centre at Ústav mezinárodních vztahů

Elections to the European Parliament (EP) fall into the category of second-order national elections. In these types of elections voters behave differently when casting their vote. But what about political parties: do they behave differently in EP elections than in national parliamentary elections? This article draws on available electoral data rela...

The second-order election theory asserts that voters treat elections to the European Parliament differently than national legislative elections due to the lack of their connection to a government-formation process. They tend to punish parties in government at the national level, turn towards small parties or skip voting in these elections altogethe...

Political parties play an important role in offering voters some choices about European Union (EU) politics. The literature on party positions on European integration rely largely, from a methodological point of view, on coding of manifestos and expert surveys. This paper opts for a different approach to the study of party positions on European int...

A developing literature on the securitisation of immigration documents the prominence of security-based framing, but its prevalence has not been systematically established in Central and Eastern Europe through an analysis of the relative importance of various immigration-related frames. Using content analysis, this study tests the securitisation of...

The Council of the eU is the primary institution through which ministers of member states can express their positions on Commission proposals and vote upon legislation. This article first examines the extent to which ministers actually attend Council meetings before moving toward investigating the determinants of ministerial participation in over a...

This chapter provides comparative descriptive and explanatory analyses of the framing of immigrants and refugees by representatives of political parties in two Central and Eastern European countries. Until recently many differentiate framing of immigrants and refugees based on their background, be it region of origin, religion, ethnicity, race, or...

Otázka právního státu je v českém kontextu upozaděná, pro instituce EU, řadu členských států, ale i občanskou společnost v kandidátských zemích jde o klíčové téma. V EU probíhají o definici právního státu tvrdé politické spory, institucím se ale v posledních letech podařilo právní stát vymezit a v menší míře i vymáhat. Právní stát je přímo navázán...

By the end of December 2002, the Czech EU Council presidency came to an end. Czechia was holding the rotating Council presidency for the second time and like in 2009 its presidency trio was rounded out by the preceding French presidency and the following Swedish one. The key difference between the two Czech presidencies was the changed institutiona...

Válka proti Ukrajině vnesla novou dynamiku do staré debaty o smysluplnosti a efektivitě národního práva veta ve Společné zahraniční a bezpečnostní politice EU (SZBP). Schvalování sankcí proti Rusku se několikrát protahovalo a výsledná rozhodnutí byla oslabována kvůli účelovým obstrukcím jediného státu sedmadvacítky – Orbánova Maďarska. Udělení kand...

Tento policy paper představuje nejdůležitější argumenty v debatě o možném zavedení hlasování kvalifikovanou většinou ve Společné zahraniční a bezpečnostní politice EU. Čeští diplomaté, úředníci a politici by se s těmito argumenty měli seznámit a zohlednit je při formulování a prosazování národních pozic. Nejsilnějšími argumenty zastánců většinového...

Reflexe se věnuje různým důvodům, které vedou členské státy EU k uplatnění práva veta ve Společné zahraniční a bezpečnostní politice EU, a přináší příklady z nedávné praxe. Prvním důvodem jsou autentické rozdíly mezi dlouhodobě sledovanými zahraničněpolitickými zájmy členských států. Druhým je propojování dané otázky s jiným hlasováním za účelem ko...

The research on the party politicization of immigration almost exclusively focuses on West European countries. To address the lack of studies of party politicization (hereafter understood as salience) of immigration in Central and East European countries, we investigate all the parliamentary speeches in Czechia and Slovakia between 2013 and 2017. D...

This article examines the media framing of immigrants around the 2015–2017 EU refugee crisis in two Central European countries, Czechia and Slovakia. Unlike most similar studies I investigate how framing varies regarding different migrant groups. Using quantitative content analysis, I show that security and cultural frames are most commonly employe...

The last decade has seen a significant increase in the study of mechanisms of informal differentiation, such as lead groups, for conducting EU foreign and security policies. This policy brief examines these groupings from the perspective of small member states based on data collected from 20 interviews with Czech stakeholders. While informal differ...

This article investigates how all the main quality and tabloid newspapers and the television newscasts of the main broadcasters in Czechia and Slova-kia framed immigrants, what the tone of the employed frames was, and who the main framing actors were before and during the EU refugee crisis (2013-2016). Using quantitative content analysis (N = 7,910...

The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. At no time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so insecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault by Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integr...

This paper explores the ways in which national identities shape attitudes towards differentiated integration in two old member states, one relatively new member state and one candidate country-namely France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Turkey. It also observes how the impact of differentiated integration on European identity is perceived in the...

This article explores which metaphors relevant political parties in Slovakia use when they speak about the EU's "finalité politique" by focusing on an analysis of their electoral manifestos prepared for the European Parliament elections in the period 2004-19. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative meth...

European party federations (Europarties) are only slightly aligned with national political parties and their low visibility at the national political level undermines their ability to perform their role in EU politics and to contribute to generating European awareness and a European party landscape. This chapter discusses the concept of Europarties...

The literature on party positions on European integration and the closely related literature on Euroscepticism rely largely, from a methodological point of view, on coding of election manifestos and expert surveys/judgments. This paper opts for a different approach to study party positions on European integration based on an analysis of variation o...

Until recently, Czechia’s party system revolved around the two strongest parties. However, this system collapsed when it was replaced by the government of Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement, which represents the most recent embodiment of a series of populist parties in the last decade. Parliamentary control of the executive is theoretically strong, but ma...

Czechia has limited experience of direct democracy. While petitions are in use and referendums can be organised at the local and regional level, Czech citizens cannot vote in nationwide referendums and have no other direct democracy tools at their disposal. Calls for the wider use of direct democracy have multiplied, however, especially in the past...

In 2017, the Czech European policy faced a number of challenges related to the great events of previous years (the migration crisis, Brexit, security policy, Eurozone reform) as well as the ongoing reflection process of the EU. Above all, the Czech approach was a typical example of reactive behaviour, and characteristic of responding to external st...

Reformní návrhy Emmanuela Macrona a Angely Merkel přináší řadu příležitostí prosadit české zájmy. Pokud se Praha nebude přehnaně soustředit na sporné otázky, otevírá se jí šance vyjednat řadu výhod-ných kompromisů. Česká republika by měla podpořit rozvoj společných evropských sil pro stabilizační vojenské operace, dokončení jednotného digitální-ho...

This paper investigates the determinants of Hungarian ministers’ participation at Council meetings over a decade long period. It aims to identify factors explaining why ministers decide to absent themselves from some Council meetings while participating in others. The analysis uses an original data set that includes information about individual mee...

Migrační krize a její možné implikace na vnitřní chod EU SHRNUTÍ A DOPORUČENÍ Případné omezení schengenské spolupráce by mělo pouze nepřímý do-pad na vnitřní trh, náklady pro otevřenou ekonomiku jako je ta česká by přesto byly značné. Česká republika se nemusí bát " trestu " za nesolidaritu v podobě omezení evropských fondů. V politických jednáních...

Multi-speed Europe, where respective Member States of the EU integrate at a different pace, has been a commonplace since the Maastricht Treaty. With debates about Brexit, Grexit, and persisting ambiguity about the future of the Eurozone as well as the Schengen Area, the talks about the fragmentation of the European Union are more intense than ever...

First, the paper discuss the legal background for the subsidiarity principle and its control by national parliaments. Moreover, the paper assess the control of the subsidiarity principle by national parlaments of EU memebr states within both the political dialogue and the early waring system over the period 2006-2015.

The paper assesses working activities of MEPs during the first year after the 2014 EP elections on the basis of eleven quantitative criteria.

This paper analyses the attendance of MEPs to the meetings of parliamentary commiitee after the 2014 EP elections across the whole EU.

The paper overviews the functions Czech MEPs gained in the European Parliament elected in May 2014 and compares the data with data from the rest of the EU member states.

The paper presents the background for the role of national parliaments in the process of European Integration. The paper was presented at the National Convent, a government-organised series of debates on EU issues, and thus also contains reccomendations for the Czech government.

Questionnaire-based survey of the main Czech political parties’ internal processes, mechanisms and expert background in the field EU politics.

This article investigates the Europeanisation of EP election manifestos prepared by Slovak political parties over the course of Slovakia’s decade-long membership in the European Union. To this aim, it conducts a content analysis based upon a novel coding scheme in which Europeanisation is measured primarily as EU issue salience and secondarily as t...

This work contributes to the debate on the Europeanisation of political parties and particularly the Europeanisation of party election manifestos. This contribution investigates the extent of programmatic Europeanisation of relevant political parties before the 2013 Chamber of Deputies elections in the Czech Republic. A content analysis is conducte...

The aim of this dissertation is to test whether the second-order election is applicable to the European Parliament (EP) election in the post-communist European Union (EU) member states. Since the second-order election model has been developed for the analysis of voting behaviour, I test model’s voting behaviour propositions on the sample of ten pos...

Elections to the European Parliament fall within the category of second-order elections. Because there is less at stake in these types of contests voters behave differently when casting votes. But the question remains: do political parties also perceive that there is less at stake in these elections and behave differently than in national first-ord...

European Parliament (EP) elections fall within the category of second-order elections: because these types of elections do not lead to the formation of government there is less at stake and, consequently, voters behave differently when casting ballot. However, since the behaviour of voters in elections cannot be perceived in isolation from the beha...

Elections to the European Parliament fall within the category of second-order elections (SOEs). Because these types of elections do not lead to the formation of government, there is less at stake and, consequently, voters behave differently when casting votes. But do also political parties also behave as if there is less at stake as voters do? This...

This paper attempts to contribute to the debate on the Europeanization of European Parliament elections. Because these elections are supposedly fought over national political issues, the analysis focuses on one aspect of political parties’ supply for these elections, namely their election programmes. To this aim, a content analysis is conducted, wi...

Elections to the European Parliament (EP) fall within the category of second-order national elections. Given the fact that these types of elections do not lead to the formation of government there is less at stake and, as a result, voters behave differently when casting their ballots. But what about political parties: do they also perceive the less...

Elections to the European Parliament (EP) are considered second-order national elections (SOE). The SOE model suggests that there is a qualitative difference between different types of elections depending on the perception of what is at stake. Compared to first order elections, in second order elections there is less at stake because they do not de...