Public administration education in a continental European legalistic setting

Abstract

The Trans-European Dialogue in 2013 was dedicated to the revisiting of the research undertaken by György Hajnal in 2003 (Hajnal, 2003) on public administration education in Europe. As part of the preparations to the conference, Hajnal also revisited his research after 10 years. The findings presented on the conference offer a theoretical framework to analyze the Hungarian case of public administration education. The claim is that the Hungarian public administration culture is still part of the “legalistic” model within the discipline. This article provides an analysis on the current institutional settings of public administrative education and also a content analysis on the curriculum of BA and MA courses in order to determine if Hajnal’s 2013 findings are still valid. In order to verify Hajnal’s 2013 findings, the article examines the contents of the current public administration programs and also formulates the latest steps for further development. In addition, the article offers an outline on being “legalistic” in terms of public administration education. Although the article states that the basic framework of public administration education – as a major driver of public administration culture – is still dominantly legalistic. It also introduces the ways in which the new public administration education system have tried to change the content of its degree programs and how it has tried to have an impact on the entire public administrative system to move from procedural orientation to a more solution-oriented mindset.