Political culture in narratives : Cultural repertoires of political knowing and types of reasoning of current political crisis
Abstract
Political culture as a concept is an interdisciplinary issue balancing between cultural anthropology, political science and sociology. This article presents conclusions of qualitative research of contemporary czech political culture.
Our research is based on 35 narrative interviews conducted by students with their parents. We can infer from quantitative studies that the level of trust in the political system, institutions and actors has hit the bottom.
These studies are not able to describe all aspects of political culture. From our position of interpretative paradigm we aim to analyse cultural repertoires through which is the political situation narratively reconstructed.
We perceive narrative as a performative genre of refering to social reality. We have identified the following repertoires: 1. interested, 2. objective, 3. evasive and 4. alienated.
We have found four types of layman's theories, which were used by narrators to explain the drop of trust in politics: 1. communist past 2. the nature of the Czech nation 3. fatalistic theories of power 4. theories of "these days".