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HUNGARIA |
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HUNGARIA |
HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK
The first steps in creating an organised public administration education system in Hungary were taken in the second half of the eighteenth century. Education reforms introduced by the “Ratio Educationis” Act in 1777 created five law academia in the country to provide education in public administration for future practitioners. At the same time, the leading academic centre of public administration for the next two centuries, the Department of Administrative Law was also established at the Royal University of Buda. The rationale behind these steps was to meet the immediate practical needs of the administrative apparatus of the absolutist feudal state.
In 1784 and 1787, the first legal regulations establishing minimum educational standards for different classes of civil servants defined a legal degree as the highest in the field of public administration. Thus, following the classic continental model of the Rechtsstaat, law was considered the par excellence public administration science.
The first period of PA education in Hungary took place between 1777 and 1849. And can be characterised as the “Kameralistik” era. That is, the scientific content of PA was greatly dominated by an approach developed by theorists of the German-speaking part of Europe. The content of teaching materials and professional publications was strictly controlled by the Austrian absolutist monarchy, which meant that even this early school of PA could only exert its impact on the Hungarian public administration with a specific Austrian interpretation.
The second period of PA education in Hungary can be placed between 1850 and 1930 and can be characterised by the efforts of the emerging liberal capitalist state to limit and control the public administration of the “Polizeistaat” within universal and public norms. This movement for the creation of the rule of law had similar characteristics to parallel processes in other absolutist states of continental Europe. The most important effect of this context was the increasing importance of administrative law as a disciplinary approach to the academic field of PA. This was reflected by both empirical facts – the professional composition, ruling culture, ethos and language etc. – of the civil service of the period, and legal regulations regarding entry requirements and career possibilities in public administration.
The period of 1930 to 1945 can be described as a highly progressive era in the history of Hungarian PA. A public administration programme was launched at the University of Economic Sciences prior to this, indicating that, in the period of post-war economic crises, disciplinary approaches other than administrative law were needed to cope with the challenges. The new school of PA, founded by Zoltán Magyary, marked a new direction in the development of PA. The new movement, influenced by the Hungarian Institute of Public Administration, reflected the latest achievements of U.S. and Western European PA, scientific management, political science and sociology. This broad and theoretically well-grounded approach to PA, combined with Magyary’s personal professional integrity and ability, had a great impact on PA science and, to a lesser extent, PA programmes of the era.
The fourth era of PA is marked by socialism. After 1949, an entirely new power structure, with a theoretical basis in state philosophy and PA, had to be created. The rule of ideology and the immediate practical interests of the regime prevented PA practitioners from creating even a crude theoretical basis for the “new socialist” public administration until the 1960s. Nevertheless, the primary focus of PA both as an academic discipline and as university degree programmes once again became administrative law. This fact reflected the surrounding societal reality, primarily the dominant communist party. Numerous societal functions became centralised, and a system of detailed and total economic planning was built. In this context, the primary tools and focus of power were inevitably legal norms.
Legal norms and regulations, in addition to the informal and omnipotent power of the party, manifested in non-legal regulations similar to the legal ones, transmitted all state decisions to the lower levels of a unitary hierarchy including most of the production sphere. It is no wonder that, if public administration was nothing more than the application of law, PA became almost equal to administrative law.
From the late 1970s on, efforts were made to differentiate between administrative law and public administration. The new emphasis was on administration as a specific element in PA not sufficiently dealt with by the study of administrative law. Prior to this, in 1969, a new type of post-secondary educational institution was launched in the field of local and regional public administration (“council administration”). In 1978, a new educational institute, the College of Public Administration, was created. The college awarded bachelor’s degrees to future officials of public administration, primarily those of territorial and local administration. The curricula of the college sought to balance administrative law, public management, and basic social sciences such as political science and sociology.
Although graduate programmes in the field of PA maintained a predominantly legal approach, academic and other research centres often based their efforts on a more interdisciplinary basis. The same trend was visible in the everyday reality of public administration, especially in some sectoral ministries and specialised deconcentrated state organs. Therefore, the dominance of legal professionals as the most competent generalists of the administration was less stressed.
After the democratic transition of 1989 and 1990, the entire social, economic and constitutional-legal framework of public administration as a set of institutions, practices, people, and an academic field of study changed dramatically. The 1990s saw two major, partially contradictory, tendencies in the development of PA programmes. The first was a continuing emphasis on general and administrative law as a disciplinary approach to PA. The second was the emergence and relatively rapid development of other disciplinary approaches to PA in academia, including public management, political and applied political sciences, public policy studies, etc.
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