Europeanisation and Implementation in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland

Abstract

The paper is dealing with the implementation capacity of public administration in four Central European countries: Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The author’s point of departure is that implementation diffi culties vary between sectors, i.e., that the process of transition and Europeanization on the one hand has a homogenizing eff ect between the countries, while on the other it generates a high level of variance across sectors, refl ecting the tasks assigned to each type of administration. An empirical test of this hypothesis is attempted: implementation diffi culties are treated as the dependent variable and distinction is made between the administrations that have production functions and the ones that have regulatory tasks. The discussion is supplemented with an analysis of the general patterns of experienced implementation diffi culties.

Keywords

• implementation
• Europeanization
• public administration
• administrative capacity
• public administration sectors