Volume 13 (2020): Edizione 2 (December 2020)

The authors of this text decided to prepare a short article, with the aim to induce further discussion and to orient ongoing and future research efforts in Central and Eastern Europe but also worldwide. The article uses the method of a multi-country case study as the basis for proposing several critical research (and policy) challenges for our region – but many of them of a world-wide character. Four countries are covered by our thumbnail informative sketches – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and the Slovak Republic. The final part of this article proposes a set of questions suggested by the CEE experience with COVID-19 for future research. Such research will both be necessary and interesting for scholarship and policy in the region, and – as a particularly interesting context and area – helpful, one hopes, for questions and answers globally, concerning the pandemic, as well as public administration and policy as a whole.

This essay elaborates how the analysis of administrative careers – both as dependent and independent variables – can be leveraged to gain a more systematic understanding of the relationship between politics and administration. It highlights how the analysis of administrative careers can provide answers to pertinent questions about the relationship between politics and administration, including civil service politicization, politicians’ motivations in patronage decisions, the interplay of organizational characteristics and top officials’ careers, and performance effects of administrative careers. It also includes suggestions on how to move forward in terms of research methods and how the systematic analysis of administrative careers can strengthen the comparative analysis of the relationship between politics and administration.

Although substantial advances have been made in our comprehension of functional politicization – political capacities and activities being taken on by bureaucrats in their administrative duties – questions surrounding its causal mechanisms remain. To shed light on these questions, we here explore increasing political polarization (and fragmentation) in Dutch politics and functional politicization over the period 2007 – 2019 to see how the two are related. To do so, we adopt a cross-time approach that observes which skills – political-strategic insight, substantive expertise (Fachwissen), or procedural knowledge (Dienstwissen) – senior civil servants perceive to be the most relevant to successfully and correctly exercise their profession in a period of increasing polarization in the Dutch political landscape. Drawing from surveys conducted with senior civil servants in 2007, 2013 and 2019, combined with semi-structured interviews conducted in 2019, the data depicts the prevalence of political astuteness in the profession and highlights the factors for its causes: institutional, organizational, and interpersonal dynamics. This indicates an (in)direct link between political polarization and functional politicization of the administrative apparatus that serves as a basis for further cross-time and cross-country investigation.

This contribution seeks to answer the question whether the new civil service legislation that entered into force in 2015 in the Czech Republic led to the depoliticization of the country’s ministerial bureaucracy. To that end, we compare the career backgrounds of top civil servants before and after the entry into force of the new Civil Service Act. The article examines the career backgrounds of the persons appointed as ministerial deputies between 2013 and 2018, focusing on their last “pre-deputy” jobs and considering a broader set of their career attributes. A focus on the previous job reveals that even before the law was introduced, bureaucrats constituted the largest share of appointees, and their share even increased with the new legislation. The incidence of deputies appointed directly from party-related jobs dropped considerably. However, when a broader set of career attributes is considered, the share of partisans among the pre-2015 deputies nearly matches that of the career bureaucrats. Ostensibly political careers among the post-2015 deputies declined but remain significant. Hence, there has been a decline in the open politicization of the ministerial bureaucracy after 2015. Party political effects also matter, as the new ANO party, after entering the executive, has taken a different approach to top bureaucratic appointments than the other major governing Czech parties. Typically, deputies appointed into the positions under the ANO’s control would not have links to the party itself but would be recruited via non-party channels, e.g. from pre-political networks of the ANO ministers and leaders. Consequently, though less politicized by party agents, the current Czech system is more a product of choices made by government ministers of the day than a stable arrangement resulting from firmly established norms and rules.

This paper examines the impact of democratic backsliding on the management of top officials in Hungary. Based on a unique data set of more than 1,600 top officials the article shows that the number of appointments to top positions increased in 2010 and subsequent years, during which Hungary experienced democratic back-sliding. Moreover, the data shows that turnover in top official positions was higher in 2010 and in subsequent years than in the period between 1990 and 2010. The paper concludes that the politicisation and high degree of instability in top official positions may be characteristic of governance in illiberal democracies.

This study examines the transparency of the regulatory framework under which ministerial advisors exist within the politicized context of a Central and Eastern European perspective. We compare profiles and career paths of ministerial advisers under five different types of coalition governments and examine if variance across government types can be explained by type of party – established vs. new parties. Empirically, the article draws on a cohort of 162 ministerial advisers in Slovakia across five governments from 2010 to 2020. We arrive at multiple findings. Firstly, we suggest the limitation in the availability and reporting of data is an important finding as it highlights accountability gaps and lack of government transparency irrespective of the party in power. Secondly, within the low regulatory environment, ministers appoint multiple types of staff including both formal “visible” ministerial advisers and “invisible” ministerial agents that, if one could accurately measure, would likely demonstrate that the ministerial advisory system is more inflated than we currently present. The ad-hoc nature of the advisory system also creates fluctuations in the size of the ministerial adviser cohort across governments and across different ministries. This would also help to explain the next finding, which is that, contrary to the experience in many countries, the overall size of the advisor population does not grow, probably because executive politicians have other avenues of appointing advisory agents. Fourthly, the advisers have a fairly equal distribution of prior employment from both the public sector and the private sector, but we do see some evidence of more established political parties preferring to recruit from the public sector and newer parties preferring to recruit from the private sector. Lastly, the appointment process appears to be highly controlled by individual ministers, suggesting personal ties are essential (link between ministerial and advisor education) and party-political criteria are a low consideration. The research is conducted using a biographical approach in which freedom of information requests and open source data is scrapped and then triangulated via a dozen interviews with current and former advisers. It argues that regulation is weak, lacking public scrutiny, which provides loopholes for employing ministerial agents in informal ways that could create, at worst, the opportunity for corrupt behavior, or at least, lead to poor practices in good governance. Therefore, future research should focus on both the formal “visible” and informal “invisible” ways that ministers recruit their advisory agents, how their agents function, and whether existing regulatory measures create a transparent and accountable governance framework.

When it comes to political-administrative relations, New Public Management has aimed for a stronger differentiation between political and administrative matters and for an empowerment of the administration towards the political level.

This article investigates the perceived degree of administrative discretion at the municipal level in the Flemish region of Belgium. We use data from a survey with Flemish municipal CEOs from 2019.

The results suggest that the degree of administrative discretion in Flemish municipalities is relatively high during policy preparation. Nevertheless, during other phases of the policy cycle most municipal CEOs perceive a certain political impact on the functioning of their administration, which reaches further than steering on the main policy lines. Second, a majority identifies a lack of mutual trust between the executive board and the administrators.

Furthermore, administrative discretion increases with the size of the municipality and the assessed capacity of the administration. Also in municipalities where the key actors of political-administrative relationships remained unchanged for a longer period, the administration has more leeway to act. Lastly, the results nuance the impact of the municipal financial situation and the composition of the majority on the degree of administrative discretion.

The aim of this essay is threefold: (1) to identify the tasks of public managers in public value management (PVM), (2) to start a debate on the relationships between autonomy, entrepreneurship and PVM from the perspective of institutional roles and management levels, and (3) to initiate a discussion about the transferability of PVM to diverse administrative systems and cultures. The public value discourse emerged in the 1990s, justifying the need for the concept through a deficit in democratic legitimacy, the delivery paradox, as well as market failure and the critique of New Public Management. Public value focuses on the ultimate purpose of the use of public resources and can thus serve to strengthen outcome legitimacy and downward accountability. Arguably, the most productive interpretation of the public value concept rests along the lines of a normative, conceptual orientation for managerial action, accompanied by a (so far somewhat sparse) set of practical tools and reasoning for public managers. Five tasks of PVM were identified: (1) conducting political management to secure legitimacy for particular value propositions; (2) leveraging public value opportunities through networks and a range of delivery mechanisms; (3) ensuring continuing democratisation through helping the realisation of politically empowered citizenship; (4) ensuring learning across multiple levels and audiences; and (5) cultivating a wider view of sustainable wellbeing for all. Regarding the applicability of PVM across various dimensions of administrative traditions and cultures, it would seem that the tasks are more compatible with some cultures and traditions than others. For instance, these roles seem more compatible with non-politicised public administrations that grant high societal status and discretion to civil servants, and provide them with generalist training and career options. One of the key open questions is under what conditions can a public value approach contribute to changes in the given public administration culture, in particular towards the development of downward accountability mechanisms in the context of democratic backsliding and constraints to bureaucratic autonomy.

This paper addresses the politicization of public institutions through the case of national ombudspersons. While there is an established literature on the politicization of top public officials, we lack research on the politicization and / or de-facto independence of supreme or supervisory bodies, including ombuds institutions. In this paper, we combine the insights of three bodies of literature in order to build a framework for the empirical study of national ombuds institutions: Literature (1) on the independence of public institutions, in particular ombuds and regulatory agencies, (2) on politicization and party patronage in state institutions, and (3) on career patterns and selection criteria of top public officials and the administrative elite. We then discuss these issues on the basis of an empirical field study of the Austrian om-buds institution: First, drawing on a socio-demographic analysis of ombudspersons we identify common features of their profiles and career paths. We find that overall the ombudspersons represent a relatively homogenous group, but the political party represents an explanatory variable for some of the ombudspersons’ characteristics. The second set of empirical results, drawing primarily on qualitative interviews with case-handling staff, demonstrates that despite the institution’s public efforts and many interviewees’ reassurances that the AOB is independent and acts as such, there are several areas in which party-related positions become visible in the AOB’s work. These results are integrated into a typology on the effects of political appointment modes of ombudspersons, which should enable further research in this field.

The paper examines the innovative HR practices of regional administrations in Russia and the inter-regional cooperation between HR departments of regional governmental bodies; in practice the dissemination is complicated by their relations with the federal bodies (national level) responsible for civil-service regulation.

The authors use the case of Russia to describe the positive experience of blended inter-regional (horizontal) and federal-local (vertical) cooperation between HR departments of the civil service (federal, regional, municipal) that started as a “best practices” initiative, guided by the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Russia (MLSP of Russia) in 2015. Several cases of such cooperation are described as examples of positive influence on the civil service with pushing changes, and as a tool to foster civil-service reform.

Our findings lead us to the conclusion that the knowledge and motivation accumulated by the innovative HR practices in regional governmental bodies enables them to overcome political, administrative, financial and legal barriers in public-service reform. From a theoretical perspective, the research shows that the theories of public-administration service reform (institutional and instrumental) should take into account the regional HR practices and inter-regional cooperation that promote those practices. Specific features and benefits of regional innovations help to compensate for the lack of formal political support of reforms, or to conquer bureaucratic resistance to change. As it happened in Russia, the regional initiatives facilitated multiple leadership behaviors that have the capacity to increase the willingness to experiment, expand commitment to innovations, and boost motivation for professional development.

Future research on the influence of new regional HR practices on civil-service reform can be concentrated on the exploration of regional communities of practice (CoP) that are involved in the process of elaborating and disseminating new HR practices. It will provide a better understanding of the limits and possibilities of the regions to support civil-service reform on a national level.

Since its origins, when it was mainly connected to the field of economics, game theory has brought important theoretic insights into many domains. Besides biology, philosophy or computer science, its findings have been applied to various fields of public policy. One specific area of public policy is that of security. Within the last two decades we have been witnesses to a significant increase in efforts to model security issues using tools of game theory and to derive political implications. The paper deals with the model of a Stackelberg security game and its real-world applications in security domains. The main aim and purpose of the paper is to provide a survey of selected cases of real-world deployed applications of the game-theoretic Stackelberg model in the area of public security and, based on the literature analysis, to discuss the potential and limitations of the model for policy- and decision-makers that are dealing with security measures on various governmental levels. Existing cases clearly indicate that the model can contribute to a better design and implementation of the security policy and help implement a better allocation of resources and thus potentially improve the effectiveness of security measures. On the other hand, the paper also discusses some limitations and potential future adjustments of the model together with points for further research.