Katarína Staroňová

Regulatory Impact Assessment: Formal Institutionalization and Practice

In the last decade regulatory reforms have focused increasingly on efforts to improve regulatory quality. As part of that development policymakers have been encouraged to consider fiscal, socio-economic and administrative effects of proposed legislation when making policy choices. The Central and East European EU member states have adopted regulatory impact analysis (RIA) mechanisms but so far there has been little analysis of their implementation. This article first compares the manner in which RIAs have been institutionalised in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Second, it explores how differences in institutionalisation have affected RIA performance. The paper concludes that there are marked differences in the RIA quality across Central and Eastern Europe, notably as a consequence of national differences in institutional and administrative contexts and capacities.

Civil Service Reform in Slovakia and Hungary: The Road to Professionalisation?

A professional civil service is the cornerstone of an effectively performing public sector. Politicisation is generally seen as the primary impediment to successful administrative development (Verheijen 2001; Pierre and Peters 2001), as it runs contrary to the principles of merit, professionalism and permanence that are essential foundations of a functioning civil service. The transition of Central and Eastern European countries into modern democracies in the past two decades brought a lot of questions and problems connected with institutional redesign, including questions regarding the clear division between political and administrative officials. This interaction between elected politicians and permanent career civil servants is a central theme of institutional politics. The relations between these two actors at the centre of government affect the capacity of governments to make and implement policies to the extent expected from modern political systems. The relationship between politicians and civil servants is of particular relevance for the new EU member countries from Central and Eastern Europe.

Analyzing scientific knowledge in documents: The case of regulatory impact assessment

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is seen as a tool for increasing evidence-based policy making and as such it is being integrated into decision-making procedures on a wide range of issues. Based on systematic consultation, clear criteria for policy choice, and economic analysis of how costs and benefits impact on a wide range of affected parties, this tool operates by using scientific knowledge and technical analysis rather than political considerations. Scientific knowledge can be used to achieve instrumental learning (Radaelli, 2009, OECD), policy change (Sabatier, 1999), to impact on decision making (Caplan, 1979; C.H.Weiss, 1999) but also to seek legitimacy from the policy environment (Edelman, 1985; Schrefler, 2010). This article suggests an analytical framework for analysing RIA documents with insight from knowledge utilization theories. We argue that in order to better understand the RIA itself, we need to look at institutional factors as well. The combination of institutional context variables and variables for RIA document content analysis which make up worldviews in this framework provide the basis for the document analysis and exploration of RIA in its context.

Internal ministerial advisory bodies: An attempt to transform governing in the Slovak Republic

Abstract In the Slovak Republic, a number of internal ministerial advisory bodies, intended to provide high-quality analyses and evidence based policy making for national policy, have been established over the last two years. We have studied how the rational technocratic model of scientific policy advice as a specific mode of governing, acted out through these new institutional sites of expertise, survives in a highly politicised environment of the Slovak public administration. Central to our study was the reconstruction of an intersubjective account central to the work of organising on which the analytical centres and their staff, as well as their patrons, participate. Complementary to this, we focused on intersubjectively shared elements of the analysts’ community and subculture within the dominant CEE public administration culture. The vision of governing with expertise shared by analytical centres rests on the principles of transparency, orientation on professional merit (primarily econometric, analytical skills), voluntarism, conflict avoidance, political opportunism and institutional autonomy. Analytical centres identify themselves as a distinct professional group – in fact, they form a distinct organisational subculture around traits such as demographic characteristics (predominantly young males with economic or mathematical/IT background), symbols, hierarchies, working culture, humour, as well as artefacts. Analysts see their mission in the provision of impartial, objective analytical evidence for informed decision making, yet they negotiate the boundary between politics and expertise on a daily basis, and, as we found, in numerous aspects of analysts’ work politics cannot be entirely bracketed.

Public administration education in CEE countries: Institutionalization of a discipline

Abstract The array of public affairs programs has been growing in the past 27 years in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Traditionally, public administration programs concentrated primarily on legal and formal institutional aspects of governing, whereas public policy and management programs were entirely absent and remain relatively new. This article discusses the contents of the MPA/MPP programs in five CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia) in order to identify major features in terms of the disciplinary and methodological character of these programs. Our ultimate question is to assess whether these programs reveal a clear, relatively robust public administration “identity,” and whether there is a convergence among programs in the region towards the so-called mainstream programs in the world.

An Overview of Discourses on Knowledge in Policy: Thinking Knowledge, Policy and Conflict Together

Abstract Around the world, there is a growing interest among policy scholars and practitioners in the role of knowledge in relation to public policy. These debates are accompanied by some confusion about what is meant by knowledge or evidence, as well as controversies around the role of scientists and suspicions of increasingly technocratic decision making. Our aim is to provide a useful overview of the major debates in this paper, and to trace six dominant discourses in current research that address the role of scientific knowledge or expertise in the policy process. We distinguish evidence-based policy making, knowledge utilisation, policy learning, knowledge transfer, social construction of knowledge and boundaries, and knowing in practice as separate discourses. We show how they differ in their understanding of knowledge, of the problem to solve in terms of the role of knowledge in policy, of practical implications, as well as in their understanding of public policy and in their ontologies and epistemologies. A condensed and structured representation serves as a basis for conducting comparisons across discourses as well as to open ways for analysis of strategic associations between the discourses. We hope to contribute to extending the discussion of knowledge in policy into the realm of epistemic politics and we suggest several avenues for future research that can draw on a range of concepts from across all of the discourses.