Szakértelem és/vagy politika. A magyar közszolgálat jogi és empirikus elemzése
Expertise and/or Politics. A Legal and Empirical Analysis of the Regulation of the Hungarian Public Service

Summary/Abstract: The paper, firstly, gives an analysis of the legal framework of the Hungarian civil service system from the point of view of its professionalisation vs. politicisation. In the next section the same questions is examined in the view of empirical data. With regards to the former question the paper’s conclusion is that the Civil Service Law – although being widely conceived as a merit system law – does not set up effective barriers to politicisation. However, the subsequent analysis of – yet unpublished – statistical and survey data suggests that politicisation is definitely not present at most segments and levels of the civil service (for example, the mean number of years served in the Civil Service is 11 years; and the proportion of civil servants with university degree (52% in 2003) has been continuously increasing). According to these analyses, politicisation is characteristic mostly for the top levels of the civil service only. In the concluding, third section the paper tries to answer questions about the causes and reasons of these – quite surprising and partly contradictory – findings, as well as about generalisability of these findings to the broader spectrum of post-communist countries.

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