Abstract
We consider political parties as crucial actors in the policy-making process due to their hegemony in appointing decision-makers in public offices (especially Parliament and government) and linking civil society with the state. Recently the political parties have been put under the stress by austerity challenges coming from the economic crisis in 2008.
To respond to this pressure the parties have to activate their policy advisory systems that are generally considered as a crucial determinant of their policy capacities. We are interested in exploring configuration of policy advisory systems of political parties because it should tell us more about their potential to respond to challenges stemming from the crisis.
From this perspective the paper deals with two issues. Firstly, theoretically, it considers adoption of the policy advisory system to political parties because models of the policy advisory system are usually derived from configuration of the government that is somewhat different from organisational settings of the parties.
Secondly, we apply the concept of policy advisory systems to political parties and for illustration of this conceptual transfer we empirically compares policy advisory systems of two dominant Czech political parties till 2013 (the Social Democrats and Civic Democrats). It focuses on configurations of their intra- and extra-party arrangements of policy advisory systems that are supposed to indicate their ability to mobilise needed policy expertise.