Parliamentary research services as expert resource of lawmakers. The Czech way

ABSTRACT

Professional politicians need a sufficient amount of quality and reliable information to work well. Therefore, parliaments across the world have expert resources at their disposal, such as parliamentary research services and libraries. Together they form a unique source of analytical and informative material to support day-to-day political activities. Although different models of expert parliamentary centres exist, these specialised comparative workplaces share a common emphasis on the independence of provided information. Since expert centres are an important part of parliamentary autonomy, their work and the quality of services they provide to their clients need to be further analysed. Therefore, the content of this paper – exploratory in its nature – is to zoom in on the expert services available to lawmakers, more specifically, to analyse the Czech Parliamentary Institute.

KEYWORDS:

• Parliamentary research service
• Czech Parliamentary Institute
• expertise
• legislatures
• information needs

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Michel Perottino, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Examples of such research centres are the American Congressional Research Centre, the Swedish Riksdagens utredningstjänst or the German Reference and Research Services of the German Bundestag, which is analysed in more detail in Schick & Hahn, 1995.

2 One other way to deal with the complexity of politics and government bureaucracy is specialization; for example, a division of labour between MPs and the committee system (see Mykkänen, 2001; Asher, 1974).

3 Döring (1995) implies that an institutional research programme in legislative studies is characterised by the claim that institutions shape the outcome of policies evolving within them.

4 The group of interviewees included these crucial employees of the PI: director, former director, head of General Analyses Department, representative of the Chamber of Deputies to the European Parliament, correspondent by the ECPRD and the longest-serving employee.

5 These are expenses for economic analyses, translations, consultancy, press monitoring or web administration. Expertise is, therefore, focused on specific tasks, but not on comparative analyses. In the Czech Republic, the annual spending limit in recent years has been more than 9000 euros per deputy or senator, and the limit is continually rising.

6 It is advisable to draw attention to a certain interconnection of the executive and legislature through party apparatus. However, the situation is changing along with the trend leaning towards the adoption of service laws and the desire to depoliticize state apparatus.

7 Other reasons commonly given for the dominance of the executive include monopolized drafting power, the possibility of using closed or restricted rules, gate-keeping power, last offer authority in parliamentary voting processes, and the threat of resignation and dissolution of parliament (Rasch, 2005, p. 2).

8 Although there is a paradox: parliament is a highly political institution. Its members, however, are often in need of information of apolitical nature.

9 We should pay attention to the difference between parliamentary research services and parliamentary science advice services. Such science advisory institutions are, for example, French OPECST or British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. For more about legislative science advice, see Norton, 1997; Kenny et al., 2017.

10 For more about ECPRD, see Hüschene, 2017.

11 The PI's staff is composed of lawyers, economists, and political scientists with career profile in academia or government. In addition to 22 experts there are also assistants and employees of the Information Centre of the Chamber of Deputies (Poslanecká sněmovna, 2020a).

12 For other reasons explaining the government's strong position on parliamentary systems, see Bjørn, 2014, p. 374. For an analysis of the phenomenon of the (ir)relevance of the parliamentary institutions, see Arter, 2006; Savoie, 2010;Zubek, 2011 and Tellier, 2015.

13 Pat Lyons writes about the Czech phenomenon of political awareness. See Lyons, 2017.

14 For an analysis of the phenomenon of legislative socialisation, see Best and Vogel (2014).

15 For more about administrative transformation in post-communist Europe, see Meyer-Sahling, 2017, pp. 127–128.

16 The IFLA is an affiliate of UNESCO. The idea of ⁣⁣its origin can be traced to Czechoslovak roots. In 1926, a conference was held in Prague, which laid the foundation for this conference a year later in Edinburgh, see Málek, 1970.

17 For more details on the transit and disintegration of Czechoslovakia, see Leff, 1997, pp. 75–145.

18 In particular, the project called Frost-Solomon Task Force, more on Sarkar, 2009; pp. 179–180 or Gastelum & Robinson, 1998, p. 9.

19 Kopecký (2001, p. 208) writes that the federal institutional system cannot be blamed for dividing the two republics. The reason behind the division was more in the behaviour of political elites and their parties. Nevertheless, three years of experience with post-communist federal institutions had influenced the position of the new parliaments in the emerging structure of institutions.

20 This was confirmed by the extensive media analysis that I focused on in other research: Žák, V. (2000, June 8). Proč máme nedokonalé zákony. Lidové noviny, p. 11.

Holecová, S. (2004, July 19). Kdo hlídá unijní zákony? Nikdo a všichni. Hospodářské noviny, p. 3.

Moyzesová, D. (1994, July 11). Bohatým brát, chudým dávat. Respekt, p. 7.

21 For more about PHARE, see European Parliament, 2020.

22 It should be noted that the direct influence of the Czech Parliament on European legislation is inherently excluded, as it is reserved for MEPs. See Kolář et al., 2008.

23 This is evidenced by the ECPRD report from 2016. See PACE, 2016, pp. 30–38.

24 The outlined program of cooperation with other institutes is called twinning.

25 The Committee was a forum for members of the Czech Parliament and European Parliament.

26 For more details on the creation of committees devoted to European affairs and the process of Europeanisation in East-Central Europe, see Ágh, 1998.

27 The staff of the PI uses materials from the OSCE, the Council of Europe, the OECD and the World Bank.

28 Belgium, Ireland and Spain, for example, set up a joint European committee.

29 The first countries to establish their offices in Brussels were Denmark, Finland, Italy, France, Great Britain and Latvia.

30 The Senate is the second chamber to consider a bill, and the Senate can apply its legislative initiative only as a whole. It is therefore much less complicated for a senator to ask an allied MP to submit a law. The right of legislative initiative is in practice most often exercised by the government as well as deputies and groups of deputies. The Czech Senate primarily corrects and reflects decisions of the Chamber of Deputies. At the same time, it is a defender of constitutional law and prevents electoral engineering.

31 Caretaker governments are established for only a short period, and it is assumed that these governments have limited freedom of action. That is the time when deputies dominate the agenda-setting process. An example could be Jiří Rusnok's Cabinet. It was appointed on 10 July 2013 and left the office on 29 January 2014. Generally, government expertise is disappearing due to the length and complexity of the legislative process and large numbers of parliamentary amendments.

32 Neunreither (2002, p. 45) argues that in most national parliaments, there is a clear distinction between MPs who belong to the majority and those who are from the opposition. The first ones can mostly rely on the expertise of the governmental apparatus. The opposition, on the other hand, cannot count on similar resources.

Additional information

Funding

This article was written within a Specific Academic Research project of the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, no. 260 595: Political order in the times of changes.

Notes on contributors

David Jágr

David Jágr is a PhD student at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. His main research interests are political expertise, parliamentary representation, and Czech politics. Email: [email protected]