The question of whether a government works well or poorly is not just a matter of concern for the citizens of whatever region that government governs; it is also of interest to scientists and analysts in a variety of fields. However, information about a government's performance is of use to the government itself. This article tries to answer the question of how government performance can be measured. It is impossible to come up with a generally acceptable and universal system of performance measurement, but the dozens of ways of measuring government performance can essentially be divided into four groups. The first group of approaches uses indicators of the socio-economic development in the governed area to measure a government's performance. The second group of approaches comprises attempts to measure government performance by means of a subjective evaluation by citizens of the governed territory or by various experts. The third group of approaches includes all attempts at measuring government performance that focus on procedural and institutional effectiveness and the quality of government performance. The last group is made up of attempts to measure government performance with the aid of aggregate indexes, which are mathematical-statistical aggregates of subindicators representing various forms of government activity, the conditions in the territory governed by the government, and a subjective evaluation of government performance by citizens, by the people in government themselves, and by various experts. Individual sub-indicators characterise various types of government activity, and it is their aggregate that measures overall government performance.
In this article the author attempts to evaluate and conceptualise how the law and legal institutions function during the period of post-communist transformation in Slovak society, taking into consideration the fact that there are other social processes in addition to transformation that contribute to the challenges that the law is faced with. To begin the author introduces the topic's theoretical and methodological background, followed by a discussion of the legal code and its developmental trends, with a focus on the causes and impact of changes. The author also analyses the particular functions and dysfunctions of the law within the broader social context, in an effort to highlight those areas where the law and legal institutions do not function sufficiently and may contribute to the establishment of a dysfunctional, anti-legal culture.
This study examines changes in narrative approaches in Czech, Moravian and (German-written) Silesian belles lettres from 1770-1790. In its examination of historical poetics and changes in narrative methods, it draws on the structuralist studies of Lubomír Doležal (his "narrative text transformation" model) and Daniela Hodrová (fictive novel vs. reality novel). Instead of the idea that prose evolves in relation to a fixed "linguistic substrate" in an immanent, autonomous way, the author inclines to the notion of a plurality of poetic codes on various linguistic levels (from stylistic registers, "narrative methods" and narrative structures to individual genres and the comprehensive aesthetic that shapes entire epochs). The study starts with an outline the socio-historical background to the emergence of literary periodicals in the Czech Lands in the early 1770s and their authors’ publishing strategies. It then considers the transformational impact these periodicals had on the literary prose of the day. The third part examines how the belles lettres of literary periodicals reacted to impulses from Enlightenment poetics such as the sentimentalism of Laurence Sterne and the Sturm und Drang movement, with illustrative interpretations of the novellas Der Philosoph in der Suppe (The Philosopher in the Soup) by Johann Ferdinand Opitz, Die neue Sapfo (The New Sappho) by Christian Heinrich Spiess and Der sonderbare Kupler (The Peculiar Pimp) by Josef Herbst and Josef Kirpal., Václav Smyčka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy