Abstract
Czech political parties, as other political parties in liberal democracies, play an important role in policy-making process. Contemporary reforms of Czech welfare state have challenged policy-related capacities of the parties and put them under the stress because they have to mobilise relevant policy expertise to sustain their position in the policy-making.
This paper asks how main Czech political parties are able to respond to this stress by their formal mechanisms and organisational arrangements that produce required policy-related expertise. We assume 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.).
Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore policy capacities and especially policy advice systems that Czech political parties have to fulfil successfully their role in political system. Concerning the Czech political parties we focus on two cases of the strongest Czech political parties, Social Democrats (left-wing) and Civic Democrats (right-wing), after Parliamentary elections in June 2010.
These parties represent two 'poles' of possible governing coalitions and we suppose that their policy capacities significantly affect government's policy activities. In exploring the policy-related capacities of these parties we concentrate on the configuration of party advice system that consists of intra- and extra-party arrangements.
These involve organisational setting of expert bodies, as expert committees, policy analytical units etc., and their relations to general political bodies (party presidium etc.). To examine the extra-party arrangements we use the Kuhne's typology of extra-party advising (Kuhne 2009) that distinguishes three sources of external policy expertise to political parties (academic-based, lobbing, and professional advising).