Abstract
Private actors are becoming increasingly involved in drafting public policy at various levels of governance, with expertise as a key resource for access. Crossing the perspectives of interest group theory and public policy analysis, the article explores under what circumstances and through what channels private expertise gets to play a role in the Czech policy-making, and how private actors as expertise providers relate to public actors in this process, in particular to political parties.
The article proposes that the private actors' influence is determined by the nature of the policy issue and the prevailing logic of the policy making process, understood following Claudio Radaelli as a proportion between the visibility and the uncertainty in the process. As an empirical enquiry into these assumptions, we present two dissimilar cases: the Czech pension reform and the transposition of the EU directive on the energy performance of buildings into Czech law.
Although their analysis confirms much of the initial hypotheses, it brings a more nuanced view of the impact of the complexity-visibility ratio on the role of private expertise by pointing to the dissociated character of the different stages of the process, as well as to the fact that political actors' demand for private expertise may be motivated by its other functions than as a knowledge input.