Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 31st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG9: The Rule of Law & Public Administration Author(s) Gyorgy Gajduschek Corvinus University of Budapest Budapest Hungary Title Civic Culture and the Quality of the Rule of Law. The Position of the Post-communist Countries in a World-wide Statistical Comparison File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Gyorgy Gajduschek Abstract “The "rule of law” (RoL) is a traditional principle, aimed at limiting the power of the state, administrative institutions …” This paper provides the first results from an analysis of the statistical relationship between civic, more specifically, legal culture and the stability and quality (depth) of the RoL. The research is based on a statistical analysis of a database compiled of (a) RoL indicators (e.g. Freedom House, World Justice Project) and (b) widely available cultural indicators, some of which may be relevant from the point of view of legal culture (e.g. Hofstede’s individualism, power-distance; Inglehart’s secular-rational values; support for democratic values, including separation of powers from World Value Survey) and (c) some control variables such as GDP/capita or religion. We collect the above information Worldwide. In this paper, we attempt to answer the following questions: (0) Where do post-communist (i.e. not only CEE but also former-Soviet countries score on the RoL indices, Worldwide, in the ‘Western’ hemisphere and in Europe; and how has that changed since the early years of transition? (1) How does this set of countries fit the general tendencies (if such tendencies could be detected at all)? (2) Are there, and if yes, what are the main potential explanatory factors of difference? (3) Most importantly, can the fact itself that these countries were ‘communist’ be considered such a – dichotomous – factor? In other words, may the post-communist countries be treated as a more or less homogenous cluster in this regard? Thus, the proposed paper steps somewhat outside of the RoL-PA relationship as it investigates the nexus between citizens’ values and beliefs and RoL as the political-legal environment of administration.
