In the last decade regulatory reforms have focused increasingly on efforts to improve regulatory quality. As part of that development policymakers have been encouraged to consider fiscal, socio-economic and administrative effects of proposed legislation when making policy choices. The Central and East European EU member states have adopted regulatory impact analysis (RIA) mechanisms but so far there has been little analysis of their implementation. This article first compares the manner in which RIAs have been institutionalised in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Second, it explores how differences in institutionalisation have affected RIA performance. The paper concludes that there are marked differences in the RIA quality across Central and Eastern Europe, notably as a consequence of national differences in institutional and administrative contexts and capacities.

The array of public affairs programs has been growing in the past 27 years in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Traditionally, public administration programs concentrated primarily on legal and formal institutional aspects of governing, whereas public policy and management programs were entirely absent and remain relatively new. This article discusses the contents of the MPA/MPP programs in five CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia) in order to identify major features in terms of the disciplinary and methodological character of these programs. Our ultimate question is to assess whether these programs reveal a clear, relatively robust public administration "identity," and whether there is a convergence among programs in the region toward the so-called mainstream programs in the world.

Do different levels of exposure to EU law implementation have consequences for the organization of national ministries? Previous accounts suggest that European integration has little influence on the ‘hardware’ of member state administrations. Data covering the organization of 21 ministries in Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia show the Europeanization effect to be more pronounced than might be expected. Ministries responsible for transposing many EU directives tend to institutionalize centralized oversight in legislative planning, review, and monitoring; ministries with few implementation responsibilities rarely make such adaptations. This effect holds when one controls for the impact of partisan preferences and organizational conventions. The results offer a counterpoint to the studies of old member states that find little EU effect on the organization of domestic ministries.

Patronage is typically studied following government terminations when political parties appoint their nominees into the state administration. However, patronage is understudied in cases when a change of minister takes place without government termination. Taking individual government ministers as the units of analysis, we identify four modalities of ministerial alterations: replacing, successive, incumbent, and switching ministers. We show that politicization occurs under “replacing ministers” following government termination, but the bureaucratic turnover is equally high under “successive ministers.” That suggests that patronage can be seen as an individualized power resource of autonomous ministers who exercise influence independently of their political parties.

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Regulatory reforms in Europe and OECD countries in the last decade have focused on various tools that would improve 'regulatory quality' by bringing more evidence, science and analysis into policy-making. This trend was also followed by Central and Eastern European Countries where regulatory impact assessment (RIA) was institutionalized on a formal level. In order to increase efficiency of RIA, several procedural changes, such as standardization of reports, twophase system and oversight mechanism are considered. This article looks at these changes and discusses whether any qualitative improvements can be observed in evidence utilization. The paper focuses on RIAs conducted in Slovakia from 2007 to 2013 in order to observe any patterns. Most significant qualitative improvement is due to the standardization of RIA and clear methodologies. The effect of an oversight mechanism with limited powers and improper timing of its control function not only does not bring the expected qualitative improvement of RIA output, but can create loopholes for avoiding RIA altogether.

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Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is seen as a tool for increasing evidence-based policy making and as such it is being integrated into decision-making procedures on a wide range of issues. Based on systematic consultation, clear criteria for policy choice, and economic analysis of how costs and benefits impact on a wide range of affected parties, this tool operates by using scientific knowledge and technical analysis rather than political considerations. Scientific knowledge can be used to achieve instrumental learning (Radaelli, 2009, OECD), policy change (Sabatier, 1999), to impact on decision making (Caplan, 1979; C.H.Weiss, 1999) but also to seek legitimacy from the policy environment (Edelman, 1985; Schrefler, 2010). This article suggests an analytical framework for analysing RIA documents with insight from knowledge utilization theories. We argue that in order to better understand the RIA itself, we need to look at institutional factors as well. The combination of institutional context variables and variables for RIA document content analysis which make up worldviews in this framework provide the basis for the document analysis and exploration of RIA in its context.