Today, we witness to profound political challenges in mere description of the political ideologies and defining their constituencies in Serbian (but not limited to Serbian) population. Serbia is a fragile society with limited democratic achievements, history of authoritarian regimes and backward development in terms of social welfare policies that should be the core of social-democratic political action. The eclectic or even confusing mixture of ideological statements and values seems to be present in political behaviour and attitudes of citizens. Indication for such confusion could be found in recent surveys among citizens, where they prefer Western model of economy, education and personal development, while in the same time choosing alliance with East (Russia) in foreign affairs and even stronger domination of Eastern model of legislative (Ipsos, 2016). Usual scale left-right is hardly applicable in Serbian environment, especially when all parties fail to have clear ideological profile.
With this project, we aim to systematically explore common political attitudes and interest among citizens of Serbia. We will investigate the citizens’ political preferences and their authentic thinking on democracy, politics, parties, value orientations and need and urge for political action. Our goal is to depict portraits of typical (and less typical) Serbian citizen in order to create precondition for understanding political developments in Serbia and citizens’ possible impact in this field. This map of political landscape of Serbia could be a basis for relevant planning of political action based on common political values and statements, which test the hypothesis that citizens do not understand politics, and hence parties shouldn’t make efforts to clarify ideological positions and strategies.
The project is supported by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Office in Serbia.
- Study KARTOGRAFIJA NEMOĆI
- Outline CARTOGRAPHY OF IMPOTENCE