Slovak Journal of Political Sciences

The Impact of Soft Tools of EU Rule of Law on Member States: The Case of Spain

Petra Měšťánková — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article aims to analyze the interaction between the European Commission and a member state, Spain, in enforcing the rule of law. The case in point is the General Council of the Judiciary (Consejo General del Poder Judicial, CGPJ), whose composition has not been renewed for five years as a result of disagreements between the main political parties, the People’s Party (Partido Popular, PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE). This situation has raised doubts about the judicial independence in the country. In this context, the article addresses the following research questions: How has the European Commission influenced political actors to remedy the situation regarding the CGPJ? And how have Spanish political actors used EU actions in the domestic debate on the renewal and reform of the CGPJ? The Spanish case shows that in a pro-European context, political actors strategically use the EU to justify their approach in a given situation. The EU is also perceived as a safeguard against a possible deterioration of the situation. In addition, the visibility of the problem due to the involvement of the EU level makes the politicians concerned about the international image of the country.

Social and Political Aspects of the Periphery. A Case Study of the Central European Region

Pavel Šaradín, Štěpánka Bieleszová — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Each country has specific regions, which differ mainly in social, demographic, cultural, and economic aspects. Our subject of interest is the study of peripheral environment that has undergone several migratory transformations in the 20th century that have affected it up to the present day. For this reason, the Sudetenland has become the subject of our research interest. The paper aims to show how the selected respondents from the studied region perceive everyday life and how it influences their political attitudes by combining three steps: the theoretical definition of the periphery, specific aspects of life in the selected Central European region, and qualitative structured interviews. For this purpose, we chose respondents' experiences with the political regime until 1989, quality of life, public services, the consequences of the transformation, access to education, the functioning of the community, and their attitudes towards supporting selected political parties. The paper shows how positive experiences of the past regime, but also emotions, mainly nostalgia, frustration and anger, are interwoven into support for political parties for some of the respondents. These factors lead to the choice of populist and radical parties. The authors uniquely extend existing theories of the periphery with a political science approach.

COVID-19 Pandemic – Battle of Narratives: Social Constructivism as a Defence Mechanism

Uroš Pinterič, Lea-Marija Clarič-Jakše — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The article analyses the development of the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Slovakia, Czechia and Slovenia in the frame of expert, political and administrative narratives. The argumentative part mainly focuses on the development of the narrative in Slovenia and uses the examples from the Czech Republic and Slovakia as the reference frame. Information was collected from the various national media outlets and organized into the comparative time frames and compared with the epidemiological data. Slovenian inconsistencies in communication patterns developed into the complete disintegration of the pandemic crisis management and into the struggle for the supremacy of personal political agenda. As a case study, the article shows the constructivist relativism through the comparison of data and government-media narrative. Thus, the article addresses the issues of relativism on the one hand and of narrative absolutism on the other. The main aim is a critical presentation of “a crisis event” in connection to the government authorities spin on an event according to their political goals. The given case, due to a rather short period, strong media coverage and high data availability, shows inconsistencies of epidemiological data interpretation, resulting in multiple realities, causing multiple responses that paralysed effective decision-making as well as effective policy measures.