Social Construction Framework and Political Parties: Social Construction and Regulation of Czech Political Parties
Abstract
Political parties represent a crucial pillar of parliamentary liberal democracies as well powerful actors in the policy process. However, their privileged positions are nowadays challenged and their social construction is contested with consequences for policy designs regulating their operation in a given setting.
On the one hand, there is a positive social construction which legitimizes their various benefits (e.g., state subsidies for their organizations, access to the media etc.). On the other hand, there is a negative construction, which is fostered by strong distrust in politics supported by both increasing pressure for the depolitization of politics and policy-making (calling for experts in political positions), and which is blaming them for corruption, clientelism, cartelization etc.
Our paper is interested in mechanisms how their social construction and political power affect patterns of policy designs which regulates their operation in a given environment. To follow this aim, we conceptualize the issue according to the Social Construction Framework (SCF - Schneider, Ingram, & deLeon 2014) and consider political parties as a target population with strong political power.
We apply SCF to a case of the process of recent major novelization (August 2015 - September 2016) of the law regulating political parties in the Czech Republic (No. 424/1991 Coll., on political parties and movements) with emphasis on the funding of political parties. We use the Qualitative Content Analysis of related parliamentary documents (proposals, parliamentary debates etc.) to address questions concerning the form of policy design patterns (allocation of benefits and burdens, rules, rationales, policy tools, implementation structures etc.) and political processes by which particular social constructions of political parties and previous policy designs influence the current policy design of the law.
According to our findings, it seems that Czech parliamentary parties have been, despite all efforts, able to preserve their positions and benefits by effectively moderating all attempts which try to constrain their privileges and to introduce some serious burdens (e.g. decrease of state subsidies, rigorous regulation of party finances). Our research also suggests that the target population of political parties has been divided to the advantaged parliamentary parties and rather disadvantaged non-parliamentary parties, and that this division is reflected in policy designs of parties funding.
Addressing a rather rare area of SCF, we contribute to our understanding why a regime of parliamentary liberal democracy produces certain kinds of policy designs rather than others. Our paper sheds light on reactions of political parties to changing environment and public opinion, willing to impose more burdens on the parties, relations between the policy design components and target population as well as the variety of techniques used to regulate political parties in a particular setting.