Abstract
This article compares three technocratic cabinets that were appointed in the Czech Republic. Its aim is to determine to what extent the cabinets can be understood as a failure of political parties.
The article outlines the concept of party failure. It argues that patterns of party failure can be found in all cases.
However, in the last case-the technocratic cabinet of Jiří Rusnok-party failure was only partial and indirect; its technocratic cabinet cannot be interpreted as resulting from an inability of the parties to form a partisan cabinet, but rather it resulted from the president's imposition of a technocratic cabinet. This imposition took place against the will of the parliamentary parties that sought to form a cabinet composed of party politicians immediately or following early elections