Volume 11 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

The article focuses on the problem of the civil service’s dependence on its political superiors in Poland in 1996–2017. It aims to analyse the motivations of politicians responsible for civil service reforms and to assess the impact of these reforms on the effectiveness of the corps’ functioning. The authors conceptualise the problem of politicisation of the civil service by referring to the theory of politicisation adding an extra dimension of political ideas and institutions as an important factor of change in Poland’s public administration system. The article describes the stages of civil service reform in Poland over the last twenty years, taking into account the political context, the most important postulated changes and the associated controversies with reference to the concepts outlined in the theoretical part. The study also comprises a relevant literature review based on a number of sources, including the reports published by the Head of the Civil Service in Poland, international databases (including Quality of Government) and specialist reports with a particular emphasis on research devoted to Central Europe. The findings paint a multi-layered and nuanced picture of the evolution of the Polish civil service and its strong associations with the issue of the so-called “unfinished transformation”. In addition the article confirms that both the instrumentalisation of institutions by the “camp” of political opportunists and their formal, radical reconstruction by the “ideological contrarians” resulting in the centralisation of power around the ruling parties have had a negative effect on the quality of civil service functioning in Poland.

The article analyses changes in the reform agendas of the Lithuanian government in the period 2004 – 2017. Instead of exploring the systemic and formal agendas of administrative reforms based on government strategies and programmes, it focuses on the institutional and actual agendas of Lithuanian authorities using a set of 20 reform initiatives. In addition to the analysis of the institutional context, we also assess a coupling logic and the exercise of political or bureaucratic entrepreneurship during reform policy making. The article finds that budgetary constraints and the reform policy priorities of the Lithuanian governments explain the ambitious agendas of administrative reforms during the 2008 – 2012 government and, to a lesser extent, during the 2016 – 2020 government. The political logic of coupling and political entrepreneurship dominated the flow of the reform process when these governments were in office, producing the top-down approach to reform policy making. In contrast, the 2004 – 2006, 2006 – 2008 and 2012 – 2016 governments relied strongly on a policy-centred logic of coupling together with bureaucratic entrepreneurship, which resulted in the bottom-up approach to administrative reforms in the country.

The goal of this paper is to document and to analyse public administration reform dynamics and outcomes in three selected areas – transparency and accountability, civil service and local self-governments.

The high level of potential access to government information in Slovakia does not “produce” increased accountability, predictability and also does not effectively serve as a tool to control corruption. We argue that citizens are not only victims, but also accomplishers: their tolerance for corruption, excessive bureaucracy and rentseeking is confirmed by many existing studies.

Concerning civil service reform, Slovakia shows a substantial reform reversal towards politicisation and centralisation after 2001, which clearly threatens the fundamental features of democratic governance. Soon after the EU accession in 2004 major regressive changes took place, and the Civil Service Office was abolished in 2006. The new legislation in force from 2017 (forced by the EU conditionality) should return the Slovak civil service back on the right track – let us to see.

With regard to self-government the reforms aimed towards the establishment of more independent local and regional self-government. However, the major issue here is the extreme fragmentation on the municipal level – almost 3,000 municipalities in the country, most of them bellow 1,000 inhabitants. Many studies confirm that amalgamation (or at least functional amalgamation) is necessary – but there is no political will to start it.

What are the main lessons from the Slovak case ? The information provided indicates that the Slovak Republic belongs to the “standard” group of CEE countries – after the first wave of democratisation reforms immediately after 1989, most of the later changes were realised “thanks to” external motivations and pressures – and not always really welcomed. The specific issue, however, is the decentralisation reform in 2000 – 2005. This change, providing really fragmented local self-government by extra rights and responsibilities, was internally driven, with positive results from the point of view of self-government principles, but with many hurdles caused by too large a number of too small municipalities.

The aim of this article is to explore and explain the 2012 civil service reform in Estonia. The study builds on the concept of public service bargain, which facilitates the operationalization of changes in the civil service system. Although public service bargain has attracted a lot of interest of public administration scholars, it has not been previously applied in the civil service research in Central and Eastern Europe. The theoretical part synthesizes previous literature on typologies of public service bargain, thus elaborating an analytical framework for the empirical study. The empirical study addresses the following research question: did the civil service reform change the public service bargain in Estonia and if so, how ? The empirical research was carried out by relying on desk research, secondary literature on Estonian administrative reforms and participant observation. The study builds partly on the materials collected for the EUPACK case study on Estonia. The analysis shows that the civil service reform brought along changes in all three components of public service bargain: reward, competency and loyalty, although the agency-type bargain was retained. The shift towards the managerial public service bargain is evidenced in the greater emphasis on flexibility in employment relations, the use of fixed-term contracts, increased private-sector-style practices at all levels of the civil service, an emphasis on performance management, and the reduction of job security. Despite the widespread criticism of NPM, the Estonian civil service reform presents a “textbook case” of managerial NPM-oriented reform. It is argued that substantially diminished rewards may contribute to a vicious circle of temporary civil servants, including problems with recruiting new officials and a further increase in their turnover, ultimately leading to a “temporary state”. The loyalty of civil servants may in turn shift towards instrumental, short-term and easily influenced or changing loyalty, thus challenging the fundamental values of democratic governance.

The chapter summarizes and discusses the main topics, developments and issues of Czech administrative reform, based on desk research, secondary literature on developments of administrative reform in the country and input obtained through mapping and analyzing ESF / ESIF support and interviews with employees of central bodies that are responsible for the coordination and evaluation of the use of ESF / ESIF support. It is based on findings prepared within the project European Public Administration Country Knowledge (EUPACK) that focused on researching dynamics of public administration in EU member states and the contribution of external support to improving public administration quality. The research indicates that partial results have been accomplished particularly in the following areas: openness and transparency, quality management implementation (by municipalities and regions) and e-government. Civil-service legislation has been consolidated rather recently, yet has changed various times, and this undermines every effort to evaluate its effects. A national PA evaluation system is being developed by the Ministry of the Interior but focuses (similarly to PA strategies and related operational programmes) on input indicators. This raises questions about possibilities to evaluate actual quality in PA and results of projects implemented within PA reforms.

A major reform of the public sector salary system took place between 2003 and 2008, where public administration was included as one of the sub-sectors in a broader scheme, covering also the health care and social care sectors, the education sector and other parts of the public sector. The reform was extremely complex, and its development consisted of several phases. The reform resulted in a completely new salary system for the public sector. There are several tangible benefits of the reform; however, there are deficiencies, too, and some of them were amplified by measures inspired by the financial crisis. In our opinion, the changes should be focused on eliminating or drastically reducing de facto automatic promotion to higher salary grades, introducing more flexibility into the system without putting at risk its coherence and ensuring the budget for variable (performance-related) pay. Additionally, but with due caution, the option should also be considered and discussed to enable the government to classify certain positions in salary ranks higher than defined in the collective agreement, as a response to the situation on the labour market.

Often a distinction is made between interpersonal and institutional trust, as the former is defined in terms of encapsulated interests, that is the idea that somebody will take your interests into account. Scholars have argued that this cannot be applied to institutions and that generalized institutional trust is therefore not a meaningful concept. This article disputes this reasoning by distinguishing this kind of trust in the governance of capital cities from such trust in non-capital cities. It argues that it can be doubted especially for the local administration in capital cities that they predominantly have the interests of their residents in mind when making decisions. The resulting hypothesis that residents of capital cities have less trust in their local administration than residents of non-capital cities is tested and confirmed through a secondary analysis of Urban Audit data. The analysis shows a significant effect in the predicted direction, which remains strong when controlling for the satisfaction with public issues, the respective region, and poverty of the respondent. The conclusion is that citizens in municipalities do know whether or not local institutions have their interests in mind when making decisions, which makes institutional trust equally meaningful a concept as interpersonal trust.

Public administration (PA) as a discipline and public governance as a closely related concept have been developing constantly and rather rapidly in recent years. A particularly lively progress is characteristic of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), owing to its post-communist legacy and subsequent transition. This paper outlines the mainstream topics of PA development within The NISPAcee Journal, which covers the CEE region and beyond. The principal objective of the paper is to systematically and quantitatively codify a series of text documents that comprises 142 articles published between 2008 and 2016 in The NISPAcee Journal, in order to identify the characteristics of PA development in the region. The paper investigates three hypotheses: first, whether the quality of the articles changed throughout 2008 – 2016; second, whether The NISPAcee Journal attests a multidisciplinary orientation in terms of scientific contributions from different disciplines, and third, whether The NISPAcee Journal reflects the West-East knowledge transfer among PA academia. The three hypotheses were tested against seven analytical dimensions. The research findings reveal that governance is the prevailing cognitive paradigmatic approach of The NISPAcee Journal. Europeanisation is the common thread of almost all articles, with a particular emphasis on the ideological elements of the Neo-Weberian and New Public Management doctrines. Qualitative methodology is still the prevailing research method, and the occurrence of mixed methodology is rare. The topical orientation of the analysed manuscripts is very diverse. A considerable emphasis is placed on the analysis and development of PA as a discipline. The majority of researchers originate from CEE countries and focus their studies on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Scientific partnership between the Eastern and the Western academic worlds is still scarce. Given the low level of exchange of best academic practices between Western and Eastern Europe, research results indicate the need for an increased internationalisation of the NISPAcee Journal and a more holistic approach to tackle the future challenges of global and regional PA and public governance more adequately.