Toward Study of Policy Advisory Systems of Political Parties: Foundations of Research on Cases of CSSD and ODS
Abstract
Czech political parties, as other parties in liberal democracies, play an important role in policy-making process. Contemporary welfare state, for example, reforms have challenged their policy-related capacities and put them under the stress because they have to mobilise relevant policy expertise to sustain their position in the policy-making.
We assume that these arrangements take form of policy advice system that can be defined as a configuration of actors dealing with policy analysis (see Howlett 2009 etc.). The article aims to propose general model of party policy advisory system and to explore its applicability on selected Czech political parties.
We argue that is possible to apply policy work concepts to parties but it should consider different settings and goals of these organisations. Based on our research, the model of party policy advisory system consists of intra-party (party bureaucracy and internal to party organized according to three party "faces" concept (Katz and Mair)) and extra-party (modified Kuhne's resources of external political advising) arrangements.
We applied this model to exploration of policy advisory systems configuration of two previous pillars of Czech party system, Social Democrats (ČSSD) and Civic Democrats (ODS) in 2013.