Political-Bureaucratic Relations, Political Dualism and Strategic Capacity in the Polish Core Executive

The author analyses how the institutional configuration of political–bureaucratic relations within the core executive affects its strategic potential, understood as the ability to effectively pursue long-term domestic policies. The core executive is defined as the prime minister and the institutional arrangements that support decision-making, policy coordination and conflict resolution within the executive branch. The article advances the hypothesis that the Polish core executive lacks the capacity necessary for effective strategic policymaking. This condition results from three interrelated factors. First, strong path dependence has mattered, as the Polish political tradition did not produce a stable and powerful central authority capable of long-term policy steering. Second, during the post-1989 transition, the ideology of a “cheap state” prevailed, leading to the neglect of analytical and coordination capacities within the bureaucracy-weaknesses that reforms inspired by New Public Management (NPM) failed to overcome due to the lack of parallel professionalisation of the administration and high susceptibility to politicisation. Third, recurrent political dualism between the prime minister and party leadership, stemming from the separation of governmental and party leadership, limited the prime minister’s ability to prioritise and enforce the government agenda. Taken together, these factors have produced an insufficiently institutionalised core executive with weakly defined strategic management processes. The article assumes that support systems-understood as institutional resources and mechanisms enabling decision-making, policy coordination, policy analysis, and strategic planning and evaluation-play a central role in assessing the strategic potential of the core executive. Analysing these systems allows for an institutional assessment of strategic capacity. Particular attention is given to political–bureaucratic relations within the functioning of these systems. The study identifies problems embedded within the core executive itself, especially at the interface between political leadership and bureaucracy in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. Although one of the core executive’s key functions is to integrate these two spheres, empirical evidence shows that such an institutional “bridge” has not developed in Poland, largely as a consequence of a dual core executive, in which key strategic decisions are taken within party leadership structures rather than within the government itself.The argument is illustrated through a case study of the “Polish Deal” tax reform, which examines how political dualism reshapes political–bureaucratic relations in the process of a complex, long-term domestic reform. The case focuses on interactions between political leadership and administrative structures within the core executive responsible for policy analysis, coordination and implementation. The analysis draws on new institutionalism and the concepts of policy capacity and the core executive, using document analysis, secondary literature and 19 in-depth interviews with prime ministers, ministers, advisers and senior civil servants. The article contributes by identifying the dual configuration of the Polish core executive, proposing a support-systems-based analytical framework, and providing new empirical evidence on how tensions between political control and bureaucratic capacity constrain strategic governance.