Abstract
Post-communist democracies are being depicted as weak, with a low level of civic participation and trust in political institutions. Yet, there is not enough evidence about the ways the post-communist political culture is constructed.
Studies of local political culture usually investigate patterns of values, focusing solely on quantitative analysis of questionnaire responses. Drawing upon a recent study of political culture theory by Winch, we conducted ninety in-depth autobiographical interviews with non-politicians and thirty in-depth autobiographical interviews with politicians who have been active in national or local Czech politics since the 1990s.
We then analyzed the cultural repertoires used by the narrators when talking about politics. In our contribution, we will briefly describe the semantic regularities of the four repertoires we have identified: interested, objective, evasive and alienated.
The results of our narrative analysis suggest that there seems to be an imaginary symbolic boundary between politicians and ""ordinary"" people; two separate worlds are therefore constructed with two corresponding sets of mutually exclusive expectations. Even some of the interviewed professional politicians were alienated from politics and perceived themselves as ""ordinary"".
An image of politics as a realm of moral corruption is therefore often reproduced by politicians themselves.