NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

6. Conclusions

6.1. Political language and political culture It can be argued that there is a close connection between language and culture, and in the case of political language and political culture, the relationship is similar. Generally, language is a tool for transmitting the cultural codes of a particular society, as well as symbols and messages from one individual or group to another. Political language, in addition, serves as an instrument for transmitting political ideas, and therefore it also serves as a useful instrument of political mobilisation. Studies of political culture have mostly been based on a quantitative approach.The works of Almond andVerba, Inglehart andmany other researchers seem to support this statement. On the other hand, a qualitative approach, which takes into account the symbolic dimension of political culture, is rather exceptional in the field of political science. Jan Kubik, Fritz Plasser and Andreas Pribersky belong to a few researchers who have exploited a qualitative analysis. My ambition was to conduct a comparative discourse analysis by employing both approaches. The question of whether an individual expresses his attitudes spontaneously, or whether he accommodates them to particular structural conditions is not that important from the point of view of my analysis. However, it would not be possible to conduct an analysis of the party programmes and media statements without taking into consideration both the socio-structural and historical development of the examined countries. From a methodological point of view, the political culture can be considered as both a dependent and an independent variable. This means that it influences the political structure, but in the same time political structure has a certain influence on the culture. Similar rules apply to the relationship between political language and political culture. Sometimes, media statements and party slogans remain without an adequate influence on political actions. On the other hand, it may happen that even marginal political ideas appearing in the political discourse can be transformed into real political proposals and policies after some time has passed. It also has to be underlined that political statements are influenced by many factors, including the institutional, historical and ideological backgrounds of their creators. This means that both party manifestos and media statements should be put into an appropriate context, which reflects the socio-structural, economic or historical development of the examined cases. Even though it is not possible to precisely measure the extent to which political language has shaped the overall political development of the examined countries, a widespread usage

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