RSS 1.0Open Research Repository - Central European University
The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.
Managed by the CEU Library, the repository provides access to CEU scholarly publications in accordance with the CEU Open Access Policy. The repository enables authors to self-deposit their publications in line with funder and publisher policies.
For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu
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(e-)Participation and propaganda: The mix of old and new technology in Hungarian national consultationsThis chapter provides a case study of the use of online platforms for national consultations that target all citizens in Hungary. The Hungarian government, since 2010 led by the national-conservative populist party Fidesz, has carried out what is the most extensive series of consultations in contemporary Europe if measured by the share of citizens involved. The consultations are dominantly conducted by questionnaires that are printed and mailed by the postal service to all citizens, but recent consultations have also offered an online platform. Drawing on previous research on what happens when populist actors employ and institutionalize participatory methods, the chapter extends the inquiry to include the use of an electronic platform. Findings of this work shows that the online component has so far not led to new dynamics, and to the limited extent that it had any effect, it has largely been negative in terms of procedural guarantees. Due to the weakness of technology to prevent abuse, the online version of the consultation eroded rather than enhanced the credibility of the consultation process. The case study serves as a cautionary tale to those believing that e-participation practices ‘by default’ lead to superior normative and/or policy outcomes.
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The fuzzy concept of collaborative governance: A systematic review of the state of the artThis article contributes to the consolidation and synthesis of scholarship on collaborative governance by expanding our knowledge of how the term is used in the academic literature and policy documents in a range of European countries. It adds value to the existing reviews of the field by conducting a systematic literature review on a corpus of over 700 article abstracts and a traditional literature review identifying five key analytical dimensions. The article also provides an exploratory analysis of grey literature hitherto outside the purview of researchers and considers the linguistic and cultural connotations that alter the meaning of the term when translated into new contexts in ten EU/EFTA countries. Findings indicate heterogeneity and fuzziness in the way the concept is used. The article argues that explicit positions with respect to five main analytical dimensions and taking into account the national connotations that the term carries across political systems would inject more clarity into the academic discourse. This, in turn, will help policymakers to make informed use of the concept, especially in multi-national policy-making arenas.
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Hungary: Creeping Authoritarianism in the Name of Pandemic ResponseThis chapter considers response to the Coronavirus pandemic in Hungary, governed since 2010 by the EU’s arguably most successful populist party, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz. Governmental responsibility for containing the virus forced the party to adopt, by and large, the “standard” policy measures, including lockdowns, social distancing, and mask-wearing, and to roll out and propagate a broad vaccination program. At the same time, the party used the opportunity offered by the pandemic for further extending the executive’s powers and limiting civil rights and liberties. Fidesz’ handling of the crisis polarized the Hungarian public: highly criticized by the opposition parties’ supporters, its own camp continued to rally to Orbán’s call, despite the extremely high death toll imposed on the country by the inadequacy of the control measures.
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Literature and Report Review: Work Package 2 - Deliverable 2.1This report constitutes the first deliverable of the project TROPICO (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments), a project that between June 2017 and May 2021 comparatively examines how public administrations are transformed to enhance collaboration in policy design and service delivery, and advance the participation of public, private and societal actors. TROPICO investigates collaborative governance across five different European administrative traditions represented by ten European Union member states: Nordic (Norway, Denmark), Central and Eastern European (Estonia, Hungary), Continental (Netherlands, Germany), Napoleonic (France, Spain) and mixed (Belgium). This report is produced within Work Package (WP) 2, which is focused on the institutional conditions shaping collaboration in and by governments within the context of reform trajectories. It runs in parallel with WP3, which researches the transformations of individual drivers and barriers of collaboration. It precedes later work packages that will carry out empirical research on policy design and public service delivery within the context of internal and external collaboration (WP4 – WP7), and work packages that will look into the effects of collaboration on legitimacy, accountability and government efficiency (WP8 – WP9). This report reviews both scholarly and grey literature, spanning several disciplines and consisting of several inter-related strands, on collaborative governance. Based on a quantitative text analysis of over 700 publications, it provides a systematic review of how the concept is interpreted in the academic literature, as well as a qualitative review drawing on a wide range of sources. We find that the term ‘collaborative governance’ is used to describe practices that differ in terms of five key dimensions: Participation (inside and/or outside government); agency (who drives these processes); inclusiveness (organizational and/or citizen participation); scope (time frame and stage of policy cycle); and normative assumptions (positive or neutral). Furthermore, the report derives from the literature a list of institutional factors that may facilitate or obstruct collaboration with some tentative propositions about the causal mechanisms behind these variables. Finally, the report confirms a gap in the scholarly and practitioner literature with respect to the nature and analysis of relevant rules and legal frameworks that structure collaborative practices (‘codes of collaboration’).