The Durability of EU Civil Service Policy in Central and Eastern Europe after Accession

Abstract

This article examines the post‐accession durability of EU civil service policy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs). Civil service professionalization was a condition for EU membership but the European Commission has no particular sanctions available if CEECs reverse pre‐accession reforms after gaining membership. Comparing eight CEECs that joined the EU in 2004, the article finds that post‐accession civil service developments are characterized by great diversity. The three Baltic States continued civil service reforms, while Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia are classified as cases of post‐accession reform reversal. The post‐accession pathway of Hungary is identified as a case of reform reorientation. The diversity in post‐accession pathways was almost exclusively the result of domestic political constellations, in particular, patterns of government alternation after accession. There were hardly any factors that could have locked in the level of professionalization that had been reached at the time of accession.

The Impact of the Eu on Agencification and Depoliticisation in Lithuania

“…It was part of the Lithuania's Europeanisation process" (Maniokas, 2013). In contrast, other empirical studies based on perceptual evidence argued that new civil service legislation did not actually depoliticise the management of top officials in some CEE countries (Meyer-Sahling, 2009).…”

“…Analysis of the EU's influence on the horizontal domain of public administration has most frequently addressed issues of general institutional performance (Zubek and Goetz, 2010), professionalisation in CEE civil services (Dimitrova, 2005;MeyerSahling, 2008;Meyer-Sahling, 2011;Meyer-Sahling and Veen, 2012) and, more recently, agencification in CEE institutional landscapes (Randma-Liiv, Nakrošis and Hajnal, 2011;Bouckaert, Laegreid, van Thiel and Verhoest, 2011). Although in the pre-accession period all EU candidate countries implemented very similar acquis requirements, previous studies have found somewhat divergent patterns of politicisation and agencification.…”

The Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Public Administration Reforms in Post-Communist Countries

“…In other words, there is some uncoupling of problems, choices, and implementation actions (Cohen, March and Olsen, 1972, p. 16). This is related not only to the fact that EU institutions were less successful in influencing actual implementation (Meyer-Sahling, 2011), but is also due to governance characteristics underlying the processes of reform design and execution in the region of CEE and the interactions amongst actors at the level of policy subsystems.…”

Understanding the transfer of policy failure: bricolage, experimentalism and translation

“…There has been considerable assessment of policy convergence within the European Union (see inter alia, Meyer-Sahling, 2011;Parrado 2008) and increasingly beyond European Union (EU) borders (Casier, 2011;Tews, 2009;Vögtle and Martens, 2014). The strength of the policy transfer literature has been to focus on decision-making dynamics internal to political systems and to address the role of agency, and processes of learning, in transfer processes.…”