Introduction

Political parties represent one of the pillars of liberal democracy and play an important, although often unheeded role in the process of policy making. Parties not only aggregate and formulate demands arising from civil society, they also hold a privileged position in delegating their representatives to central policyformulating and decision-making posts in the legislature and the executive; consequently, they can have a significant influence on the policy-making process. Czech political parties have faced many challenges and problems related for example to the formation of the Czech state after 1993, the economic transformation of the 1990s, accession to the EU, and the world economic crisis in 2008. This difficult position has been made even more uncertain in recent years with the advent of escalated apolitical discourse that stresses professionalism and apolitical (depoliticised) politics.

This leads us to the logical question: what expert policy capacities do Czech political parties have in order to influence the process of policy making in the direction that they have determined for themselves? We study the parties’ formal mechanisms and organisational structures in the form of policy advisory systems, which are necessary for the elaboration of the required policy expertise. We are interested in finding out what kind of organisational and expert capacities in the form of policy advisory systems exist in political parties (similarly Craft and Howlett, 2012b).

Our main goal is to present the structure of the advisory systems of the main Czech political parties. Arrangements of policy advisory systems are considered the main determinant of the policy (analytical) capacity of individual organisations (see for example Howlett and Oliphant, 2010), which Czech political parties need for the successful fulfilment of their role in the political system. This topic is new and not sufficiently studied in the Czech environment, because the majority of Czech political science research concentrates on the party system itself and not on the structure and functioning of parties. That is why our study will have above all an exploratory character. In its conceptualisation we are inspired by texts focusing on political party organisation (particularly Katz and Mair, 1995 and the tradition of cartel party theory, and Harmel and Janda, 1994 and their theory of party change) as well as by texts studying the notion of policy work (Colebatch, 2006; and especially Howlett, 2009) and primarily by texts studying advisory systems in the sphere of public administration (for example Halligan, 1995; Craft and Howlett 2012a; Hustedt, 2013).