Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG1: Local Government Author(s) Eva Hejzlarova Charles University Prague Czech Republic Title Financial Aid above the Legal Standard at the Municipal Level: Case Study of the Influence of Civil Servants on Policy Design File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Eva Hejzlarova Abstract The aim of the paper is to explore the policy design of the particular policy measure administrated in some Czech municipalities and with that describe the specificities of the measures initiated by municipal office workers – heads of social affairs departments. Thanks to theoretical scope of the social construction of target populations and of the concepts focusing on the role of office workers in policy formulation and implementation the paper is able to describe the specificities of municipal office worker in their role of policy creators. The role of the office worker as policy creator is being widely discussed in academic literature, the main innovation introduced by this paper is the perspective of the output of the role – particular policy design. The perspective allows us to answer the questions such as: Do policy designs initiated by politicians on one hand and office workers (heads of municipal social affairs departments) on the other differ? Does the political initiative of these office workers bring some significant difference to the municipal social policy? Under what circumstances may the office workers become policy creators? Answering the questions is fundamental for understanding the dynamics of local government (in the Czech Republic but maybe also in other CEE countries). Methodogically, the paper builds on large quantitative survey among 227 Czech municipalities which enables the author to select the cases and municipalities of thorough research. The core of the analysis thus lies in in the analysis of documents and eight semi-structured interviews related to nine policy measures in five Czech municipalities. The results show that policy designs initiated by office workers differ from policy designs initiated by politicians. The policy designs introduced by heads of municipal social affairs departments have lower allocation, they use lower share of the budget, the rules are more general and more flexible, they construct target population/s differently and they are not going public via media. Office workers´ (heads´ of municipal social affairs department) policy measures overall impact (measured by numbers of supported people) is marginal. Still, it may be very important for particular people whose needs are not addressed by official measures. The circumstance under which the office worker may become the policy creator is mainly the relationship between him/her and politician. In the relationship the politician is having exective power but his/her ability to understand and control the office worker´s output is very limited. In case the office worker is well experienced and the agenda of social affairs runs well he/she is given trust which may result in this huge space of discretion. The paper first concludes that theory of social construction of target populations may include bureaucrats as policy actors (these are neglected in the concept). Second, the empirical basis of the paper is limited but the findings indicate that the dynamics of local government should focus more on the role of office workers in the process of policy-making and implementation.
