Abstrakt
Political parties play a key role in the policy-making process in the European liberal democracies. In comparison to other policy actors, political parties have a privileged institutional position, based primarily on their right to nominate candidates or elected and appointed officials to public office.
Thus, political parties have great influence on the policy process and specific policy content, not only in the stage of agenda-setting and evaluation phase, but also in the process of policy formulation, policy decision and policy implementation. However, political parties are somehow omitted actor in policy process literature.
With the transformation of welfare state's role began to grow the volume and the quality of policy-related expertise. Performance of politics were in need of an increasingly larger volume of specialized policy information - whether associated with new policies in the frame of the rise of the welfare state model, whether related to the transformation of this model - and along with appropriately qualified policy personnel and cadres.
Politics became more expert-based. On the one hand, with regard to the institutional position of political parties in the policy-making process, the pressure of policy expertisation weights especially on them.
As organizations in the political sphere political parties, especially in the first half of the 20th century, have fulfilled the representation function - they define social problems from the point of view of their own ideological bases, they aggregate interests, and represent them in the political realm. Along with the rise of the welfare state model there has increasingly started an expectation of their ability to produce - either alone or with the help of other resources - policy solutions to given problems and to ensure their implementation by competent policy managers / officials in public office.