Abstract
Our aim is to explain and defend a theoretical approach to investigate the phenomenon of policy-related expertise in political parties and to show the construction of a research design and use of specific methods. Political parties in the Europe are in a privileged position of policy making.
We are interested in how the political parties generate expertise that is essential for their involvement in the policy-making process and would like to answer two questions : 1) How is the generation of policy-related expertise tailored to the internal structure of political parties ? and 2) How is the work in this policy-related expertise environment really done ? Our answer is starting from organizational theory. Political party is understood not only as a collective actor, but also as a structure in which various individual actors realized their interests.
We define the structure as a set of rules and resources that structure the conduct of individual actors. Resources can take the form of allocative and authoritative ones.
Rules which may take the form of both formal and informal, determine the course of action in which can be resources used to implement the interest : first, it is a system of rights and obligations, which legitimizes the conduct of a specific actor, and second, it is a cognitive procedure that gives the sense of the action. We consider the political party as an organized anarchy or fragmented, loosely connected anarchy and this with all the methodological implications it hold.
We will use the theories and methods used to analyze modern organizations / public administration in order to do our analysis of the policy-making related expertise in political parties.