Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 30th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG7: Public Administration Education Author(s) Gyorgy Gajduschek Corvinus University of Budapest Budapest Hungary Hajnal Gyorgy, Title Public Administration identity in Central and Eastern Europe. What do Public Administration curricula reveal? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Public administration (PA) identity is a relatively recent concept addressing the general, ‘paradigmatic’ understanding of PA, its functions, and functioning in a country. PA identity affects diverse phenomena such as research agendas, university education curricula, and PA practice; in addition, it is also shaped by these features. In line with mainstream literature, we differentiate between three main types of PA identity: the managerial (associated most typically with Anglo-American PA systems); the legalistic (associated most typically with Germanic PA systems); and the system that is identified with the French-Napoleonic model. The paper explores the PA identities of Central and Eastern European countries by overviewing the empirical comparative literature addressing public administration education in these countries. Operationally, our analysis relies mostly on the disciplinary composition of Public Administration / Policy / Management degree programs. E.g. the dominance of political and social sciences suggests that the country follows the French model. Our findings suggest that no stable and relatively unanimous identity may be identified in the region. Instead, the region’s countries follow various models, frequently in a mixed (muddled?) way among or even within countries. Undoubtedly, the legalistic approach is more widely present than in contemporary West-European countries, though it has significantly decreased in the past decades. The patterns we find may be explained by (a) the traditional orientation of government (i.e. following dominantly the French or German model) and (b) contemporary interactions with the international public administration practice and education, that predominantly bolstered the managerial model, since the early years of transition.
