Politicisation of the Czech Republic’s ministries: still trailing behind the West?

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the results of a large-N enquiry into the Czech Republic’s ministries based on two specific types of politicisation (functional, formal) and accounting for four types of work positions. The enquiry yielded the following findings: Functional politicisation of ministerial middle and lower management as well as rank-and-file positions is predominantly low. However, politically motivated appointments and promotions, executed through formal politicisation, pertain to ministerial high management positions. Overall, the enquiry suggests that Czech ministries are moderately politicised, showing a somewhat lesser degree of direct political influence than generally suspected.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicisation
• bureaucracy
• Central Europe
• Czech Republic
• ministry
• quantitative enquiry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Due to an inconsistent treatment of the terms ‘bureaucrat’, ‘official’ and ‘civil servant’ in the literature, these terms are used interchangeably in the text.

2 The Labour Code lays out the generic causes for an employee’s dismissal which comprise: termination of the employer’s activity, labour redundancy, medically certified inabilities, unsatisfactory execution of work (following a prior written notice and a 12-month interval for intervention) and gross violation of work regulations (intoxication at work etc.) (Labour Code, par. 52). On the other hand, the employee must not be dismissed in case of temporary illness (not intentionally self-inflicted), military service, public office service, pregnancy, maternity/paternity leave or the care of a family member (Labour Code, par. 53). The clauses of the Labour Code thus do deal in various ways with employee protection against political interference.

3 To complete the conceptual takes on civil service politicization, it is necessary to point out that the relevant literature registers some more types of politicisation. Those include especially administrative politicisation (Eichbaum and Shaw 2008; Hustedt and Salomonsen 2014) dealing with the impact of ministerial advisers on administrative or policy agendas. Yet another typology concerns direct, professional, redundant, anticipatory, dual or social politicisation (Peters 2013). As none of these politicisations is the subject of our study, for the reason of brevity, we refer to them only shortly in this endnote, with detailed accounts available elsewhere (e.g. Hustedt, Kolltveit, and Salomonsen 2017; Neuhold, Vanhoonacker, and Verhey 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Charles University Research Programme “Progres” Q18 - Social Sciences: From Multidisciplinarity to Interdisciplinarity. Univerzita Karlova v Praze.

Notes on contributors

Jan Kohoutek

Jan Kohoutek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, the Czech Republic. Holding a PhD in public policy, he specialises in issues of policy work, policy design and politico-administrative relations as well as, more specifically, in quality of educational policies. On these topics, he has published in peer-reviewed international journals, including Canadian Public Administration, Higher Education Policy and Higher Education Quarterly.

Martin Nekola

Martin Nekola is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, the Czech Republic. He holds a PhD in Public and Social Policy and is interested in public policy, social science methodology and evaluation research. He publishes extensively on drug policy, policy work and policy design. He is an editor of the Central European Journal of Public Policy.