Internal Ministerial Advisory Bodies: Account of Governing and the Boundary Between Politics and Impartial Expertise in the Analytical Centres in Slovakia

In the Slovak Republic, a number of internal ministerial advisory bodies, intended to provide high-quality analyses and evidence based policy making for national policy, have been established and/or restructured over the last two years. We have studied how the rational technocratic model of scientific policy advice as a specific ‘mode of governing’, acted out through these new institutional sites of expertise, survives in a highly politicised environment of Slovak public administration. Between September and February 2018, we conducted a series of 13 semi-structured expert interviews with the heads of internal ministerial advisory bodies (‘analytical centres’), focusing on topics including everyday managerial and other practices of directors’ work, understandings of “analysis” as a task and competence, ensuring and perceiving output quality, institutionalisation of the analytical centres, role in policy processes, as well as interaction with stakeholders within and outside of their ministries. Central to our study was the reconstruction of an intersubjective account central to the work of organising on which the ACs and their staff, as well as their patrons, participate. Complementary to this, we focused on other aspects through which the technocratic ‘mode of governing’ is made possible. These included the persons and materials participating on this work of organising (examining the intersubjectively shared elements of analysts’ community and culture, but including also the subjectivities of individuals), as well as looking at the constitution of the interface between ‘politics’ and ‘expertise’ as a continuous achievement. The vision of governing with expertise shared by analytical centres rests on the principles of transparency, orientation on professional merit (manifested primarily through application of econometric, analytical skills), voluntarism, conflict avoidance, political opportunism and institutional autonomy. This vision is part of a specific account of governing, and its underlying notions of reform of public administration and policy as an antagonistic mode of organising to “the rest of public administration” (and also in stark contrast to the top-down accounts of institutional reform put forward by the EU and Western reform discourse). Analytical centres identify themselves as a distinct professional group – in fact, they form a distinct organisational subculture around traits such as demographic characteristics (predominantly young males with economic or mathematical/IT background), symbols, hierarchies, working culture, humour, as well as artefacts. This subculture can even be considered a ‘counterculture’, since its intention is to transform the dominant system and is even perceived as a threat. Analysts see their mission in the provision of neutral, objective analytical evidence for informed decision making, yet they need to negotiate the boundary between politics and expertise on a daily basis, and, as we found, in numerous aspects of analysts’ work politics cannot be entirely bracketed. Also, interestingly, analysts need to reconcile a significant internal contradiction between criticising the current practices of public administration as politicised, yet are also willing to bend the rules in areas such as recruitment, remuneration or organisation of work (“functional politicisation”).