Introduction

Ministries are somewhat enigmatic institutions for many people. Ministerial officials are usually guarded from ordinary citizens by reception clerks who reject all unauthorised visitors. Information on what concrete tasks are undertaken in a given ministry and which members of staff are responsible for them is often restricted. Not surprisingly, then, research on what ministerial officials do is rather limited. This is especially true for countries such as the Czech Republic where until recently only very little and rather anecdotal evidence was available (Drulák et al, 2003; Scherpereel, 2004).

In this chapter we open the black box of the Czech ministries and we try to describe the ministerial policy bureaucrats and what they do. We draw especially on a survey organised by the authors of this chapter between April and July 2013. Eleven ministries out of 14 agreed to participate in the survey. A total of 1351 complete questionnaires were obtained, and the response rate was 29.4% (see Veselý, 2013 for an in-depth description of the methodology of this research). Of course, the empirical evidence can always be analysed and interpreted against different ‘baselines’. In this chapter we take as a point of reference similar research conducted in the Czech Regional Authorities (kraje) between September and November 2012 (N = 783, response rate of 32.4%; see Chapter Eight for a description of this survey).

The Central Public Administration of the Czech Republic

The organisation and functioning of the central state administration is defined by Act number 2/1969 Collection, on the Establishment of Ministries and Other Central Bodies of State Administration of the Czech Republic as modified by later amendments. This so-called Competence Act (CA) currently establishes 14 ministries and 11 other bodies of central state administration (such as the Office of the Government and the Czech Statistical Office). The central state administration also includes various administrative bodies with nationwide responsibilities, subordinated to one of the ministries, which are not mentioned in the law (for example the Czech Trade Inspection Authority and the Central Land Office). In this chapter we will focus upon the ministries because they are arguably the most important institutions in terms of policy analysis and policy work in general.