Abstract
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Paper proposal for NISPA CEE Annual Conference, 2021
Title: Centralization Revisited: Hungarian Experience with Civic Participation in Public Services in the Midst of the Pandemic
The author: Márton Gellén, assistant professor, National University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary, gellen.marton@uni-nke.hu. Formerly: visiting associate professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. During 2017-2020 the author served as deputy state secretary for victim support and legal aid at the Ministry of Justice, Hungary.
From 2010 onwards, Hungary has been depicted as a country with reverse tendencies in public administration development. This tendency was considered by certain authors as backsliding in democracy. The current developments amidst the COVID-19 pandemic however, puts the centralization trend into an entirely new context. Disaster management has always been associated with centralized operations of public administration. One could argue that a widespread pandemic could serve as a good pretext for further centralization and/or as a legitimation for centralizations so far. I argue however, that this conclusion totally misses the point in terms of civic participation in public services.
The current analysis picks up the thread of scrutiny from the early 2010s displaying how civic participation has been an essential element of formulating and delivering policies in Hungary despite critical voices from the beginning of the period in question. Approximately 65 thousand civic organizations are active in all walks of life and many of them are strong if not decisive contributors of public services. Certain sectors have varying possibilities and legacies in civic participation though that are displayed in the article. The research contains statistical evidence of the overall figures of civic participation and offers a couple of sectoral analyses whereas civic contribution characteristically forms the given field of public services.
The pandemic and the various government responses to it (from informing the public to announcing partial curfew) offer an extraordinary context to further examine how civic contribution to public services and government to civil society relationship develop. The article contains the result of a qualitative analysis with civil organizations engaged in women support regarding their experience of fighting the pandemic while performing their normal duties.
As a conclusion, the article offers a much more complex framework of understanding the various dimensions of cooperation between government and civil society that was previously analyzed by the corresponding academic literature.
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