Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) is an organizational unit of the state and is the only institution in our country providing public support for basic research projects.
As part of the announced programs, it finances scientific projects for scientists and teams, as well as for young and emerging researchers. Its activities are governed by Act No. 130/2002 Coll., On Support for Research, Experimental Development and Innovation, and is an independent accounting unit. It therefore manages separately the special-purpose and institutional funds allocated by the state budget. GAČR started its activities in 1993.
Projects
The project seeks to analyse regional-level quality of democracy in the Visegrad Four countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in 2000–2020. We will analyse four dimensions (and their interdependence) that may explain variability in quality of democracy across regions: representation, participation, competition, and accountability. In this regard, the important question is especially if individual dimensions of quality of democracy are independent or rather reflect a latent variable. If these dimensions (or the variables measuring them) are independent from one another, then we can only conceive quality of democracy as a multidimensional phenomenon. Contrarily, if all dimensions reflect an underlying construct, then it might be possible to develop a summary measure of the quality of democracy. To investigate these questions, we will employ selected statistical techniques (e.g., factor or cluster analysis) and finally we will focus on the question of whether there are any influences between quality of democracy and regional socio-economic characteristics.
The project seeks to analyse the quality of democracy at regional level in the so-called Visegrad Four countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in 2000–2020. Four dimensions of quality of democracy will be analysed: representation, participation, competition and accountability.
The project focuses on the analysis of the determinants of women’s political representation at the local level in the Czech Republic and Slovakia between 1994 and 2014. The aim is to systematically investigate several groups of factors that can potentially affect the success of women in elections: socioeconomic and demographic, cultural, and institutional and political. An effort to cover the entire two decades that have passed in both countries since the restoration of local government and the transition to democracy (a total of six electoral acts), is guided by the intention of reaching beyond the synchronous comparison of the success of women in one act of voting between different municipalities, but with the help of diachronic comparison to monitor possible changes and stability of each independent variable in a distant time periods. The main outcome of the project is two monographs (one of them in English language). In addition, we publish eight other academic texts; two of them will be published in impact, and the remaining six in peer-reviewed, journals.
The main goal is the systematic mapping of the women's political representation at the local level in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We will analyze the various dimensions and factors that may explain the different level of women's political representation in individual municipalities.
It became a topos of academic debate of the last two decades to question or even contest "traditional" concepts of political and constitutional theory like the (nation-)state and sovereignty, whose notion became the focal point of debate about post-Westphalian statehood. Poststructuralism, methodological cosmopolitism as well as legal pluralism and radical democracy are challenging classical understandings of sovereignty. However, new approaches to the "late" sovereignty cannot escape logical difficulties when dealing with the problem of critical situations, in which political units either reconstitute or save themselves by means of emergency measures breaching their own rules. In the framework of the project, we will explore alternative approaches to the question of the relevance of sovereignty, which are in part inspired by the classical modern authors and are based on the analysis of the role played by this concept in the imagination of political and social reality.
Our goal is to subject to critical scrutiny contemporary approaches to the concept of sovereignty in the light of the notion of crisis – even againts the background of classical conceptions. One monograph, one international conference, one collective monograph and seven articles on the topic.
The presented project represents a long-term research and publishing platform focused on publishing municipal books and methodology of editorial work with this type of documents, coordinated by research centres and covering the whole area of the Czech Republic. The project is a follow-up to a three-year research supported by the Czech Science Foundation in 2009–2011 (GAČR 404/09/0214), which brought together the activities of workplaces and researchers dealing with study and editorial access to a fundamental source on the history of towns – municipal books. Moreover, it also follows up an earlier research that set the rules of the critical edition series (GAČR 404/04/0261). As part of this project, a revision of the outdated inventory of municipal books (until 1526) and its extension to 1620 inclusive was launched. In cooperation with Bach Systems, an on-line accessible database of municipal books was created, with descriptions of municipal books inserted by trained archivists in selected regions. The territory of the Czech Republic has so far been covered by approximately 50 %, therefore a follow-up project is being submitted in order to complete the started research and on its basis also complete a tool that centrally records medieval and early modern municipal books.
The essence of the project is to research the cultural specifics of the Krušné Mountains and their immediate hinterland, which forms a compact economic, social and artistic space designed primarily for mining of precious metals at the beginning of the early modern period. The project realization will be based on the results of historical and source research of the key localities of the region on both sides of the Krušné Mountains ridge, structured on the basis of social and economic aspects (towns, nobility, church). Of all these environments, elites were recruiting ordering works of art whose form was determined by the confessional affiliation of patrons (Catholics, Utraquists, Unity of Brethren, Lutherans). In addition to evaluating the ordering and confessional aspects, the project will offer an alternative to the traditional periodization of the Gothic and Renaissance periods on the basis of new artistic criteria appropriate to the nature of the transition period. The result will be a database of works of art, a thematically focused issue of the Ústí Anthology Historical and book monograph examining the cultural and social specifics of the Krušné Mountains region of Ars Montana (1459–1620).
Other projects
