Abstract
The article describes results of qualitative research focused on ways in which people relate themselves to the realm of politics in the context of the post-communist Czech Republic. Drawing upon a recent study of political culture theory by Winch, we conducted ninety in-depth autobiographical interviews with citizens and thirty interviews with politicians.
We have found four types of narratives of crises, which were used by narrators to explain political scandals and the drop of trust in politics: narratives of the communist past, narratives of the nature of the Czech people, fatalistic narratives of power, and narratives of these days. These narratives were told in different ways and led to different conclusions according to the mode of their implicit relation to the politics.
Using the concept of cultural repertoires, we have identified semantic regularities of four conversational repertoires of politics: interested, objective, evasive, and alienated. It has turned out that these repertoires are very important for the orientation in and the interpretation of several ongoing crises, so the meaning of narratives of crises depends on the use of a concrete conversational repertoire.