Introduction

The first public policy schools and programmes were created in the US in the late 1960s (Ellwood and Smolensky, 2001). Gradually, policy programmes have expanded to most other developed countries (Geva-May, 2006; Geva-May and Maslove, 2007; Cloete and Rabie, 2008; Fritzen, 2008; Geva-May et al, 2008; Wu et al, 2012; Reiter and Töller, 2013). After the fall of communism in 1989, policy programmes began to be created in Central European countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. However, with the exception of analyses of public administration programmes in Central and Eastern European countries (Hajnal and Jenei, 2008; Hajnal, 2003, 2014; Hajnal and Jenei, 2008), virtually nothing is known about such programmes in these countries.

This chapter seeks to describe Czech public policy programmes and the role of policy analysis in them. To do so, we focus upon programmes carried out in universities and accredited by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport that provides bachelor’s, master's or doctoral degrees. This is because there is no evidence on non-academic programmes, and to the best of our knowledge professional and continuing education courses on public policy/policy analysis are virtually non-existent in the Czech Republic.

First, we briefly describe the higher education system in the Czech Republic and provide an overview of the programmes that are related to public policy. Second, we focus upon public policy programmes in the Czech Republic. Then we describe the role and nature of the policy analysis courses offered in these programmes. This is followed by a quantitative analysis of diploma theses in the three most important programmes, which sheds light on their orientation. We conclude with some more general remarks on the idiosyncratic features of public policy education in the country.

The chapter is based mostly on analysis of the publicly available list of study programmes accredited by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, an internet search, email correspondence with public policy and policy analysis instructors, syllabus analyses as well as a quantitative analysis of master's theses in the three main public policy programmes.