Bureaucrats or Politicians? Mutual Control of Law-Making in Coalition Governments

After several months of entering the coalition government led by Social Democrats, the former minister of finance and leader of his own new populist movement ANO Andrej Babis criticized The Legislative Council of the Czech Government (GLC) in a media interview that “the GLC is holding back a lot of things, for example, these days I asked where the Law on Control is, and it has been there since May. This is one of the biggest brakes, along with the House of Commons, why do we not act quickly passing laws”. The head of the GLC conversely accused Mr. Babis that drafts of his ministers from his party are flawed, drafted by inexperienced novices. Such claims deserves particular investigations because the executive phase of legislative process is largely understudied. The current research is limited to specific issues (e.g. role of RIAs) or limited to descriptive analysis of the raw data (e.g. number of bills as an output (Goetz and Zubek 2007). There have been several explanations proposed by a research that was exclusively focused on a legislative arena such as saliency of the bill (Zubek and Klüver 2015), ideological position of a party (Martin and Vanberg 2004), desire of smaller coalition partner to keep tabs on the larger party ́s ministers (André et al. 2016), internal conflict within the government (Pedrazzani & Zucchini 2012), or large differences in the issue position of cabinet ministers and her own party (Indridason & Kristinsson 2016). Although above mentioned studies focused on legislatures, most of the explanations can be inferred also to the executive arena. To our knowledge, there is no such a study that would investigate what is going on in the executive phase. It is a black box for political scientist. Not because of the lack of interest, but rather due to the lack of available data in most of the countries. The Czech Republic represents and ideal case for several reasons. It has electronic system for exchanging official documents eKLEP (partially publicly accessible). The system tracks all the phases of the proposed bills and provides all the necessary information, various document versions at a certain stage of the process, RIA reports, bill`s report and comments from other ministries. Furthermore, the case of the Czech Republic is interesting for theoretical reasons. During the period covered in our analysis, the Czech Republic has experienced two ideologically distinct governments and two technical cabinets introduced after political crisis. Government composed of traditional parties as well as populist movements. Our main research questions are: What factors explain that a draft bill is substantially changed? What factors explains that some ministry is more active in attempting to change o draft bill of another ministry? We demonstrate, that the executive phase is largely driven by bureaucracy. There is a strong informational asymmetry between the professional bureaucrats and political principals. Unlike in the legislative arena where actors send messages to their audience (voters), the executive phase is rather in shadow.