Electronic Library of Scientific Literature - © Academic Electronic Press


SOCIOLÓGIA
SLOVAK SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW



OBSAH 3/2003, s. 193-284
CONTENTS 3/2003, p. 193-284

 

Štúdie
Studies

Recenzie
Reviews


Policy Making Under Coalition Politics in Slovakia

Katarína Staroňová and Ľudmila Malíková

Department of Political Science and at the time of article writing a Junior Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center, USA. Department of Political Science at Comenius University Bratislava

Policy Making Under Coalition Politics in Slovakia. The coalition form of the government is very common in Central European countries, and most of the countries have already experienced those relations among the coalition partners influence decision making process, which in turn has profound consequences on the development of policies, or may even result in the break or discontinuity of ongoing policies. The paper aims to present the basic data and analysis of the impacts of a coalition government on public administration, specifically on the policy making process in Slovakia. It provides an historical overview of the coalition governments and defines three basic types in the recent history of independent Slovakia: dominant party coalition (1994-1998), broad coalition (1998-2002) and right-wing oriented coalition (2002-present). The authors examine various aspects of coalition making processes within these three types of coalitions, particularly with the focus on its impact on policy making. The authors argue that type of the coalition agreement and relations within the coalition has profound consequences on the quality and speed of the policy-making processes and on the politicisation of the public administration. The terminology and final paper is a result of the discussion in the Workgroup on administrative-political relations at NISPAcee.

Sociológia 2003 Vol. 35 (No. 3: 195-228)


Divided Memories: The Image of the First World War in the Historical Memory of Slovaks

Gabriela Kiliánová

Institute of Ethnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

 

Divided Memories: The Image of the First World War in the Historical Memory of Slovaks. The paper analyses the theme of the “First World War” in the collections of oral tradition narratives recorded since the beginning of the 1960 in the framework of collective or individual ethnographic field research throughout Slovakia. The collected data are approached from two perspectives:

1. Memories of contemporary witnesses are seen as part of popular memory on WWI in the Slovak society in the 20th century.

2. Memories on WWI are analysed as special texts reflecting historical experiences of ”ordinary men and women” in the war times 1914-1918. The focus is on how the changes in wartime every day life were perceived by soldiers and those who remained at home and how they were interpreted in the context of the known historical facts.

The research addresses the concept of historical memory as a part of social memory. The analysis examines the similarities and/or differences in the memory cultures among Slovak population. Results suggest the existence of multiple layers of historical memories that would give different image of the First World War in Slovakia. Narratives are also analysed as special information sources on the dramatic and tragic years 1914-1918. Findings bring additional evidence on how the global catastrophe was perceived by the Slovak population, how it affected people and changed dramatically their lives.

Sociológia 2003 Vol. 35 (No. 3: 229-246)


Orientations of Young People from Bratislava and Prague to Citizenship and European Identity

Ladislav Macháček – Barbara Lášticová

Institute of Sociology and Department of Social and Biological Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

Orientations of Young People from Bratislava and Prague to Citizenship and European Identity. This report presents the results of the empirical research carried out with young people (18-24) from Bratislava and Prague within the project ”Youth and European Identity”. The aim of this project is to provide an insight into the orientations of young people from strategically selected regions in 6 European countries (UK, Spain, Austria, Germany, Slovak and Czech republics) to ‘being European’ and to European citizenship. In each studied region, a random sample and a sample of people who are more likely to have a European career (”target group”) are compared. The most important items in our respondents’ definition of what is Europe are ‘certain values and traditions’ and ‘membership of the EU’. Young people from the Bratislava random sample consider being future EU citizens as more important for their overall identity than their peers from the Prague random sample. The young people from the target groups in both cities think of themselves more often as ‘European citizens’ than the young people from random samples. Also, more young people from target groups reported very strong or strong feelings about being European. In both cities there is no difference between the attachment to Europe expressed by the target groups and random samples.

Sociológia 2003 Vol. 35 (No. 3: 247-266)


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