WG10 | NISPAcee Information Portal

WG 10: Politico-Administrative Relations in CEE

Chairs:

Bernadette Connaughton, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick, Ireland

Dr Bernadette Connaughton is a Lecturer in Public Administration and served as Head, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick, from 2012-2015. Her teaching and research interests include comparative politico-administrative relations, ministerial advisers, environmental policy, and Europeanisation. From 2002-2008 she co-chaired the NISPAcee working group on Politico-Administrative Relations with Georg Sootla and B.Guy Peters. Her recent publications include a chapter in Ministers, Minders and Mandarins: An International Study of Relationships at the Executive Summit of Parliamentary Democracies (eds R. Shaw and C. Eichbaum) and a book The Implementation of Environmental Policy in Ireland: Lessons from translating EU directives into action (MUP in press).

Katarina Staronova, Institute of Public Policy, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia

Katarina Staronova graduated from Wagner School of Public Service, New York University USA and Central European University Budapest, Hungary. She hold PhD. from political science at Comenius University Bratislava Slovakia. In 2003 she worked as a research fellow at Woodrow Wilson Research Center, Washington D.C., USA.

She is an associate professor at the Institute of Public Policy, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia, having co-founded it in 2005 and which offers first MPA program in Slovakia. At the same time she teaches at the Leadership program of RANEPA, Moscow since 2018 and is a guest lecturer at several Universities in CEE countries. Her research/scientific activities specialize on politico-administrative relations, public administration modernization, civil service reform, the process of public policy creation (including the transposition process), etc. She was part of a working group at the Government Office Slovakia, preparing Strategy for human resource management in the public sector 2015-2020, and in creating the new Civil Service Law, which came into effect on 1 June 2017. She is an author of numerous academic articles and studies on issues in civil service, e.g. baseline report on Individual Performance Appraisal in Central Government Organizations in Western Balkans.

She also works as a consultant in the issues of public administration reform, civil service management and policy capacity of civil servants for the World Bank, UNDP, and OECD, where she has participated in analytical missions in countries such as Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldova, Kosovo, Georgia, Romania and others.

Call for papers

The NISPAcee Working Group on Politico-Administrative Relations focuses on research observing the roles and interplay between ministers and senior civil servants in the policy making process. In Central and Eastern Europe, politico-administrative relations present a variety of arrangements across country settings that are shaped by many factors, including public administration tradition, political culture, institutional conditions, and levels of trust. For those countries who are EU members, the necessity of an effective interface between politics and administration was regarded as imperative to the administrative development process in Central and Eastern Europe. Civil service reforms implemented by national governments in advance of EU entry, however, have generally yielded piecemeal results in terms of managing PAR and are characterised by a lack in continuity. In addition, how the internal political-administrative environment operates is influenced by external factors and crises. This is most evident in the impact of Covid 19 and how dealing with the pandemic has affected PAR and the provision and utilisation of policy advice within national settings.

In conjunction with the main conference theme for the 30th Annual NISPAcee Conference and this era of ‘turbulent governance’ we welcome papers that frame PAR within the context of crisis, vulnerability and resilience, and explore recalibrations of the roles of ministers, senior civil servants, and advisers in the policy making process.

We also welcome papers that explore general developments in PAR within the CEE region. An overarching aim of this WG is to bring together scholars from different countries and professional backgrounds to consider theoretical perspectives and discuss empirical findings on politico-administrative relations.

Submissions may include, but are not limited, to papers on the:

•   Assessments of politico-administrative relations in CEE and comparative papers;
•   Role of ministerial advisers (partisan appointees, special advisers, policy adviser) in CEE and institutional arrangements;
•   Effects of politicisation on senior appointments and civil service development; policy making, implementation and overall public administration performance (including EU policy delivery);
•   Exploring different forms of politicisation and patronage;
•   Novel ways of measuring the scope and extent of politicization in civil service systems;
•   Development of policy advisory systems (PAS)

Abstracts should align with the PAR working group themes, identify a clear research question and indicate the proposed contribution of the research. The content of the abstract should also provide information about the theoretical framework presented and methodology used in the research.

From participants of this working group full paper is required before the conference.
Deadline of full paper submission is 20^th of May 2022.

You can find manuscript guidelines on THIS LINK.

The 30th NISPAcee Annual Conference, Bucharest, Romania, June 2 - June 4, 2022

Registration for the conference Closed