Illiberal or simply unorthodox? Public Administration education in Hungary

Abstract

Over the past decades, Public Administration (PA) education programmes in Europe shifted their focus from a predominantly law-oriented approach to a more multidisciplinary, social science and managerial one. This paper deals with the tenacity of traditional, law-oriented PA education programmes that can be found in a limited, but not insignificant, range of countries throughout Europe. The paper has two aims. Firstly, it attempts to test hypotheses which seek to explain this tenacity. Secondly, it wishes to examine the extent to which this tenacity is related to new forms and paradigms of government emerging in certain Central and Eastern European countries, sometimes referred to as “illiberal democracy”. The method is a two-case comparative study of Germany and Hungary.