Competing or complementary? Experts and parties' members facing the interest aggregation and the manifestoes production
Abstract
The capacity of expertise is more and more considered as a common and obligatory need and good for every party which try to get into the government, based on the idea of less political and more technical problems to solve on the national or local level. This proposal deals with the relation between political parties' members and experts, the relation between these two groups, their influence on the process of interest aggregation especially in terms of the production of political and electoral manifestoes.
We will primarily focus on Czech political parties and their manifestoes produced and presented during the last decade. Our hypothesis, especially facing the question of intraparty democracy and considering the Parties' functions, are that there could appear a conflict between two diverse legitimacies which in final weakens the party organization and influence their capacities and ways to fulfil their functions.
So the party became more and more a formal shell used by individuals basing their position on their statute of expert, helping the parties to fulfil their functions but also promoting themselves, and getting retributions to the detriment of members which have only their partisanship to put forward. The other face of this phenomenon is that the less party's experts are socialized within the party, the less disciplined they are and more prone to defections or change of party affiliation.
Here we will focus on the problem of the role played by experts on the process of manifestoes production in the frame of the Czech democracy.