Electoral strategy of protest and populist parties from the perspective of their ideological and programmatic identity: Content analysis of ANO 2011

Abstrakt

The aim of this speech is to analyse the electoral strategy of protest and populist parties from the perspective of their ideological and programmatic identity on the example of the current Czech government movement ANO 2011 during the last Czech election to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament in 2013. The author uses quantitative content analysis and coding for its electoral program according to international methodology, developed by Manifesto Research Group at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).

Then he use also hermeneutical qualitative content analysis for for other official documents available on the Internet. This article argues that ANO 2011 is not possible to describe as a typical populist party according to all analyzed signs, because the idea of direct democracy was not one of the most important aims in its program and called itself as the center-right party.

ANO is the ""mixed"" type of political protest party, because its analyzed documents and speeches are based from the perspective of regime changes not only on realistic proposals for policy action, but also on populist elements. Its candidates criticized the whole current and past political establishment, separated people and elites in two different homogeneous groups with antagonistic relationship between them.

The article also shows that the movement used political marketing tools in the campaign very efectivelly.