Cultural Influences on Roma Policy Making Czech and Slovak 罗马文化对政策制定的捷克和斯洛伐克的影响.docVIP

Cultural Influences on Roma Policy Making: Czech and Slovak Policy Advisory Bodies Eva Sobotka Are Roma policy-making bodies interchangeable across cultures? To what degree are differences in Roma policy decision-making among states reflections of cultural distinctiveness as opposed to products of issue area, bureaucratic processes or elite personalities? Put simply, how must culture, defined as the socially created and learned values that influence human interaction, be factored into the Roma policy-making equation? These are provocative questions. Although many policy analysts agree that culture is an integral aspect of decision-making, very few efforts have been made to study it systematically. Instead, as Hudson points out, culture is often used as residual catch all category: When all is said and done, those differences in Roma policy making that remain to be explained are usually attributed to some amorphous notion of culture. This project is an attempt to examine the impact of culture on Roma policy making. More specifically, I hope to explore in greater detail the nature of the relationship between cultural values and the structures and processes within Roma policy advisory bodies of the governments. The ultimate goal is to provide a better understanding of how cultural influences the Roma policymaking process, which in turn might provide more accurate predictions of Roma policy choice and practice. Given the paucity of empirical research in political science linking culture to Roma policymaking I employ a framework borrowed from cross-cultural organisational psychology. Specifically, I use a dimensional framework developed by Geert Hofstede (1980, 1991). According to Hofstede, placement on each of the dimensions is correlated with differing structural and procedural attributes in various IBM subsidiaries found in more than fifty countries. His conclusion is that national culture, defined as the unique combination of placements on the four dimensi