Abstract
|
This paper deals with the management of the senior civil service (SCS) in Hungary in an international context, focusing on the reasons and effects of politicization on senior appointees.
The financial crisis of 2008 has had the effect of calling into the question of professional and social status of senior civil service in Europe. Several comparative analyzes prove that a certain convergence can be detected between the European countries. The majority of the states are working on the establishment of a SCS, and at the same time many of them are depriving it of its own institutionalized structure. However, this evolution did not produce a new technocratic model, but in fact it reinforced the political influence. At the senior management level, the Weberian interpretation of bureaucracy based on the principle of the separation of administrative and political roles has been replaced by the notion of a fuzzy border between politicians and bureaucrats.
However, the emergence of politics has been appeared differently in the European countries. While the administrative elites of the Western countries have been shown some stability despite the disappearance of the Weberian universe, in the Eastern countries, the politicization was reinforced and the old "nomenclatura" has been transformed into a new "clientura", producing an almost complete "fusion" of political and administrative roles.
In this context, it is necessary to analyze the legislative status of the Hungarian bureaucratic elite between 1992 and 2021. Such a study could fill a gap because the Hungarian SCS as a subject was mostly part of political studies, and the lawyers and sociologists has not paid sufficient attention to it. It can be explained by the fact that, on the one hand, the evolution of the legal regime has not led to a sui generis status, except for a short period of time, and on the other hand, the data on top managers are difficult to access.
Despite all the difficulties, in this paper we intend, on the one hand, to present the evolution of the "status" of senior civil servants and their management in international comparison and, on the other hand, to draw a portrait of the members of the senior civil service by analyzing their publicly available personal data (distribution by assignment, gender, age group, degree, foreign language knowledge, etc.). Given that one of the main questions of the studies on SCS is to what extent SCS status is different from "common status" of public servants, our analysis will include a comparison of total staff statistics with that of senior civil servants, seeking sociological differences between the two social groups.
Finally, the paper provides country-specific, fact-based argumentation to the theme of politico-administrative relations and identifies that depoliticization intentions of senior civil servants failed, and leadership of public service in Hungary - in line with international trends - became more politicized.
|
