THE POLITICAL PARTICIPATION OF THE ELDERLY PEOPLE IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The stereotyped view of elderly people as politically passive persons not participating in the public sphere has been rebutted by many researches in post-industrial countries. On the contrary, it is becoming apparent that elderly people are highly politically active, especially in those forms which do not require any high activity. Classical examples are high election turnout and party membership. The high election turnout of elderly people is visible in the Czech Republic nowadays. This could not be seen at the beginning of the 90s because the launching of country transformation towards the democratic system was accompanied by exceptionally high public interest in political affairs. The election turnout in the first free parliamentary election in 1990 was 97%. The next development has brought phenomena known from west European countries – decline of election turnout in the political field and the second demographic transition with extensive population ageing in the demographic field. Elderly people have become a group that is highly interested in political affairs and is watching political issues in mass media most intensively. Our paper is based on a data analysis from European Values Study (EVS) which surveyed data in the Czech Republic in 1991, 1999 and 2008. Due to the longitudinal nature of the data not only the current political participation of elderly people has been researched but mainly their development and changes in the past two decades. We focused not only on differences between elderly people’s and young people’s participation but also the disputability of the general image of elderly people as a source of votes for left-wing parties. |
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