The presented paper tries to interpret the campaign before the Czech presidential election in 2013 from the perspective of Je rey Alexander’s performative theory. It argues that the process of preference formation cannot be completely explained on the basis of rational interests of the voters, media or socioeconomic strata. On the contrary, the paper based in durkheimian paradigm argues for the importance of collective emotions. The campaign is understood here as a sequence of performative acts in which the candidates, understood as collective representations, try to associate themselves with emotions of the voters. The performance in Alexander’s perspective takes place in the civil sphere formed by the cultural code with binary structure of the democratic and antidemocratic side. In this perspective the case of Czech presidential campaign will be shown with the focus on the unexpected advancement of Karel Schwarzenberg to the second round of the election., Vít Horák., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
The article discusses the o cial presentations of the two most successful candidates of the rst round of the presidential elections in the Czech Republic 2013, Karel Schwarzenberg and Miloš Zeman, from the perspective of the concepts of positive and negative political advertisement and the re ection of the election campaigns by Czech citizens. By the means of the framework and content analyses the topics and the most frequent words of the o cial (created by campaigns teams) materials are identi ed. The results are interpreted with regard to the attributes of positive and negative campaign. Using the statistical analysis of the data from public opinion survey by CVVM the Czech public’s re ection of the election campaigns is described. The results of the study indicate that we can denote Zeman’s campaign after the rst round of the elections as a negative one. Zeman’s campaign has also proved to be more speci c and memorable - by both, subjective evaluation of the respondents and the associations, connected with the candidates after the elections., Monika Cervinková, Lucie Kulhavá., and Obsahuje seznam literatury