Introduction

Policy analysis is one of the largest and most dynamically developing areas of the study of policy in Western democracies in recent years. This dynamic is caused not only by growing demands for solutions to acute social and political problems but also by attempts to understand the changing world and society we live in. The Czech Republic recently celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Like liberal democracies in the West, the country went through many transitions and faced many problems during those 25 years, for example economic transformation, EU enlargement, the effects of globalisation and regionalisation, security threats after 9/11, the world economic crisis after 2008. Thus, one might expect the kinds of pressures that stimulated the quick development of science-based policy-related advising in the form of policy analysis in the Euro-Atlantic area to bring about a similar need for expert policy advice and policy research in the Czech Republic as well.

In this respect, I should ask about the contemporary state of Czech policy analysis and its development. I attempt to grasp the development of Czech policy analysis from science-based policy-related knowledge (until World War II) over professional policy-related work activities during the communist regime to the establishment of a specific academic (sub)discipline dealing with policy problem solving after 1989. The goal of this text is to try to define the nature and state of Czech policy analysis, primarily from the perspective of the demand and context factors (see below) behind its historical development. Here I emphasise this perspective because other chapters deal with other aspects and meanings of policy analysis. Based on a review of related literature and my own observations, my underlying assumption is that the development of policy analysis as science-based policy-related knowledge used for political advising is a result of the interaction between academic (sub)disciplines dealing with policy problem solving and their social and political environments. For conceptualisation I rely on approaches working with the supply-demand model discussed below. Applying these lenses, I subsequently draft a historical overview of the development of policy analysis in the Czech Republic, especially in the inter-war period, the communist regime and the renewed democracy after 1989. This is especially interesting in a country that went through so many political changes in the 20th century.