Czech Presidential Elections 2013: Echo Chambers and Silent Majority (the Case of Karel Schwarzenberg)
Abstract
Presented paper focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the first direct presidential election in the Czech Republic in January 2013. The electoral campaign was massive, long lasting and exceptional in many aspects.
The public involvement was unusually high, so was political endorsement of publicly know figures, media attention and its coverage and support for certain candidates. Having no previous experience with the direct vote, the multiple presidential candidates had applied broad range of approaches to the campaigning, with various levels of success.
The most notable case was the confrontation between the progressive, social media driven campaign of Karel Schwarzenberg and the traditional, TV oriented, low profile campaign of Miloš Zeman, who finally won the election in second round. This result brings interesting questions on what methods are actually successful in contemporary campaigns? The main research question is: Why Karel Schwarzenberg campaign failed in reaching out to significant part of population? During our research we intended to prove that the online campaign of Karel Schwarzenberg has turned itself into what is know as Echo Chamber (as defined by C.
Sunstein). According to the theory we can say that Schwarzenberg's supporters ended up in a rather close circle of mutual self-support, but failed to reach the undecided voters.
Methodologically, we approached our subject by means of quantitative research and we used large amount of data collected in a research project realised by department of Marketing Communication and PR, Charles University in Prague. The project was launched in October 2012 and followed all campaigns till final round of election in January 2013.