Detailed Information on Publication Record

The article elaborates the state of research on the Czech political parties and party system, while putting primary emphasis on methodological positions, as applied in the research, and on its major fields. After brief survey of topics and issues typical for the Czech political science research on the Czech party system the article pays detailed attention to attempts at finding appropriate typology of the system. Drawing upon analysis of key works on the Czech parties and their system we can identify two approaches normative and empirical-analytic that have been utilized in the Czech political science in the party research. However, the latter approach proves to be more efficient and increasingly dominant. Besides the search for typology, seen as a constitutive feature of the research, even when it has not yet managed to produce a final answer as to the type of the Czech party system (in particular, Sartoris typology is used, but models of Seiler, Blondel and von Beyme are applied as well), research on cleavages and their roles seems to play important role in the recent years. Finally, the article concludes the research on the Czech party system is not fully developed, but luckily displays tendencies to incorporate more fields than ever, thus giving a fresh chance to finding appropriate theoretical and methodological tools for future developments in the field.