Publication details
Já platím, já rozhoduji! Političtí podnikatelé a jejich strany
| Title in English | I Pay, I Decide! Political Entrepreneurs and their Parties |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Monograph |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
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| Description | The book "I Pay, I Decide! Political Entrepreneurs and their Parties" offers an analysis of parties run by political entrepreneurs, especially those which operate or which operated recently in the Czech Republic. The political entrepreneur is essential for such a party in the role of founder and also in terms of its organisation and approach to political issues. The entrepreneur actually controls the party and even arguably owns it. The introductory chapter maps important and interesting cases of such parties abroad, including Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Ricardo Martinelli’s Democratic Change in Panama, Viktor Uspaskich’s Labour Party in Lithuania and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. This comparative perspective, for one thing, allows a better understanding of the rise of Czech entrepreneurial parties, and for the other, provides a foundation for their theoretical definition and typology, which focuses on the size of the financial, media and other resources of the leader and on the party’s ability to build up a geographical structure and recruit membership. This theoretical and comparative chapter is followed by a short reflection on the background from which Czech entrepreneurial parties have emerged. The ensuing core of the book then analyses four of those parties that have succeeded in elections to the Chamber of Deputies (the lower chamber of the Czech parliament): Vít Bárta’s Public Affairs, Andrej Babiš’s ANO and Tomio Okamura’s two successive parties, Dawn of Direct Democracy and Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD). First, the emergence and evolution of each party is explained, with special attention given to the figure of the founding father; then the party organisation and its functioning are described, as well as party appeals and political programme, essential for understanding why and how they managed to win followers. Followers’ profiles differ across the parties, and are described in the last chapter before the conclusion. |
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