Political Culture in East Central Europe

Political culture is a key issue for the evaluation of the transformation process of the political systems in the east-central European countries and a main concern in their perspective of joining the EU. Although there are various research programmes in this field, the comparison between the 'new' political systems and their western (European) models is still problematic. Therefore this publication follows three main lines: a discussion of the concepts actually applied for research on the political cultures of the region and of possible alternatives; a descriptive approach to the respective national political cultures, including comparison with an Eastern (Russia) and a Western (Austria) neighbour; a presentation of the respective national data and a discussion of their regional comparability. The contributors are collaborators of the main university and research institutes in the field from Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Thus the volume gives an overview on the state of research on central European political culture, its actual results and its perspectives.