Abstract
This chapter addresses policy analysis in Czech political parties. We are interested in how the main Czech political parties use policy analysis to respond to increasing demands on their policy capacities in policy making.
Thus, we focus on the parties' formal mechanisms and the organisational arrangements that produce the required policy-related expertise. We assume these arrangements take the form of policy advisory systems (see among others Howlett, 2009).
In exploring the parties' policy capacities, we concentrate on the configuration of a party advisory system on the intra- and extra-party levels. The intra-party arrangements of policy capacity involve the organisational setting of expert bodies, such as expert committees, 'shadow' ministers (or party speakers on the policy), policy analysis units and so on.
Our examination of the extra-party arrangements of policy capacity is based on Kuhne's (2008) typology of extra-party consultation, which distinguishes three sources of political parties' external policy expertise (academic-based, lobbying and professional consultation). We focus on Czech parties represented in the Parliament, especially the two formerly predominant political parties, the Social Democrats (left-wing) and the Civic Democrats (right-wing).
These parties represented the two 'poles' of possible governing coalitions and we suppose that their policy capacities have significantly affected the government's policy activities.