György Hajnal

Public Administration Education in Europe: Continuity or Reorientation?.

The article explores the changing patterns of disciplinary orientation in European public administration (PA) education. The study builds on an earlier research, which defined three distinct clusters of countries, based on their specific PA education tradition. It asks whether countries’ movement away from the Legalist paradigm has continued since then and if yes, what were the factors triggering the shift and towards which cluster: corporate or public. The empirical basis of the article is a small-scale expert survey involving ten European countries. The key finding of the research is that since the early 2000s the geographical scope of Legalism in PA teaching has shrunk further with a number of formerly more Legalist-based countries having moved towards at least one of the two alternative clusters. These changes can be attributed to the demonstration effect of the international PA education field and a shift in actual needs triggered by domestic reforms. However, some countries in the response set – notably, Germany and Hungary – seem to remain largely unaffected by these trends and continue on an overwhelmingly Legalist PA education path.

‘Government Windows’: One-Stop Shops for Administrative Services in Hungary

The public administration reform program called the Magyary Program (Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, 2011) was initiated in 2010. An important component of the program was the establishment of so-called Government Offices in the capital city of Budapest and in the 19 counties. The newly created Government Offices, strictly controlled both administratively and politically by the central government, put an end to two decades of struggle between the core administration, surrounding the prime minister, and the diverse set of special and general administration services controlled by specialized agencies and ministries. A subsequent step in the public administration reform — strongly linked to setting up an integrated administrative system on the intermediate level — was the initiation of integrated service centres representing the different specialized public organizations that had been merged into the Government Offices. In 2011, the integrated service contact centres called Government Windows started to operate as the front offices of the newly created Government Offices. At this first phase of the larger project, 29 Government Windows were established (one to four per county). Some months later, in addition to the initial 30 types of administrative services offered by the new one-stop shops, another 31 were added to their profile. In 2014, during the second phase of the project, the establishment of about 300 one-stop shops on the lower district level is foreseen.

Illiberal or simply unorthodox? Public Administration education in Hungary: A comparative perspective

Over the past decades, Public Administration (PA) education programmes in Europe shifted their focus from a predominantly law-oriented approach to a more multidisciplinary, social science and managerial one. This paper deals with the tenacity of traditional, law-oriented PA education programmes that can be found in a limited, but not insignificant, range of countries throughout Europe. The paper has two aims. Firstly, it attempts to test hypotheses which seek to explain this tenacity. Secondly, it wishes to examine the extent to which this tenacity is related to new forms and paradigms of government emerging in certain Central and Eastern European countries, sometimes referred to as “illiberal democracy”. The method is a two-case comparative study of Germany and Hungary.

Coordination Practices in Hungary: The Case of Széll Kálmán Working Group

The newly elected Orban cabinet that entered into office following the landslide election victory in May 2010 found itself caught in a situation requiring deep and instant structural changes to the public household. As Figure 19.1 shows, the long-term negative trend of the fiscal balance trespassed, as a consequence of the ensuing fiscal and economic crisis of 2008, the threshold of sustainability. The two action plans announced in the first months of the new administration contained only some short-term fire alarm measures. A direr problem was achieving systemic and longer-term changes, particularly on the expenditure side, within the very short time frame available and at less than prohibitive political costs. Such measures were devised only by the Szell Kaiman Plan (SKP) announced in March 2011 (Government of Hungary, 2011).

Government Capacity and Capacity-Building in Hungary: A New Model in the Making ?

Th e literature on Central and Eastern Europe’s (CEE) emerging illiberal democracies is growing rapidly in general (Greskovits 2015), particularly in the case of Hungary’s journey (Ágh 2016; Csillag and Szelényi 2015; Hajnal and Rosta 2016; Hajnal 2015; Korkut 2012; Kornai 2015) or, rather, its somewhat trail-blazing path in this direction. Most of the accounts strive to describe the core common features of these movements, distinguishing them from “mainstream” liberal democracies, in order to describe and understand the dynamics which lead to their emergence and foster their sustained existence and even proliferation. Additionally, they endeavour to grasp the main eff ects and risks that accrue from this phenomenon.

A New Doctrine in the Making? Doctrinal Foundations of Sub-National Governance Reforms in Hungary (2010-2014):

The study attempts to reveal the doctrinal foundations of Hungary’s sweeping sub-national governance reforms (SGRs) that took place in the period 2010-2014. It compares actual SGRs with internationally mainstream doctrines of major contemporary reform, to determine the extent to and the ways in which Hungarian SGRs are a mixture of these trends as opposed to being a novel paradigm of its own. The study concludes that Hungary’s reform path substantially diverges from all three major reform paradigms examined—that is, New Public Management, New Public Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State. We end with the proposition that this deviation is not of an unintended or accidental nature; rather, it seems to be part of a coherent and rationally pursued vision of (sub-national) governance, possibly referred to as “illiberal.”