IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nos/vgmu00/2021i6p84-102.html

Development Through Intervention? Revisiting Criticism Of Hungarian Democracy

Author

Listed:
  • Marton Gellen

Abstract

Hungarian public administration culture has traditionally been considered as overtly legalistic and proceduralist, which appears to be in contrast with claims of weakening the rule of law or facing sanctions under Article 7 of the Treaty of the European Union. This article offers an overview on the criticisms put forth by academic writers and EU institutions regarding the Hungarian development path and puts them into the wider context of democratization through transaction (transitology, democracy export) theory. The article compares findings of contemporary interventionist authors with the propositions of such iconic writers as Dankwart Rustow (1970) and Samuel P. Huntington (1984) and attempts to connect the dots between these realms of thought. These authors all share the view that democracy shall be exported the more and quicker the better. Transitology, though, has had its critics, while contemporary interventionist theory appears to be rather monolithic without considerable criticism. The article uses the approach of Payne (2006), and of other authors, to question various statements of contemporary interventionists.Not least, recent developments in Afghanistan provide historical evidence that the ambitions of transactional democratisation are predetermined to fall short on non-democratic institutions imposing democracy using non-democratic measures on recipients of various sorts.

Suggested Citation

  • Marton Gellen, 2021. "Development Through Intervention? Revisiting Criticism Of Hungarian Democracy," Public administration issues, Higher School of Economics, issue 6, pages 84-102.
    • Handle: RePEc:nos:vgmu00:2021:i:6:p:84-102
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://vgmu.hse.ru/data/2021/11/16/1443576801/6_Bloc_Engl_2_6_21.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:cup:apsrev:v:53:y:1959:i:01:p:69-105_00 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Ramona Coman, 2014. "Quo Vadis Judicial Reforms? The Quest for Judicial Independence in Central and Eastern Europe," Europe-Asia Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 66(6), pages 892-924, July.
    3. Christopher Pollitt, 2003. "Public Management Reform: Reliable Knowledge and International Experience," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 80370, Inter-American Development Bank.
    4. Ropret Marko & Aristovnik Aleksander & Kovač Polonca, 2018. "A Content Analysis of the Rule of Law within Public Governance Models: Old vs. New EU Member States," NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy, Paradigm, vol. 11(2), pages 129-152, December.
    5. Mitcham, Carl & Emeritus,, 2021. "Science policy and democracy," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    6. Christopher Pollitt, 2003. "Public Management Reform: Reliable Knowledge and International Experience," OECD Journal on Budgeting, OECD Publishing, vol. 3(3), pages 121-134.
    7. Daivd S. Bernstein & James H. Anderson & Cheryl W. Gray, 2005. "Judicial Systems in Transition Economies : Assessing the Past, Looking to the Future," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 7351, October.
    8. repec:idb:brikps:publication-detail,7101.html?id=68561 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mark Christensen, 2007. "What We Might Know (But Aren't Sure) About Public-Sector Accrual Accounting," Australian Accounting Review, CPA Australia, vol. 17(41), pages 51-65, March.
    2. Javed Miraj & Zhuquan Wang, 2021. "Factors Influencing the Implementation of International Public Sector Accounting Standards in Pakistan," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 14(9), pages 1-15, July.
    3. Gellén Márton, 2014. "From Overdecentralization to Overcentralization ? Hungarian Experience in Handling the Crisis at the Local Level," NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy, Paradigm, vol. 7(2), pages 51-69, December.
    4. Satu Kalliola & Tuula Heiskanen & Riikka Kivimäki, 2019. "What Works in Democratic Dialogue?," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 8(3), pages 1-20, March.
    5. Marek Kwiek & Wojciech Roszka, 2022. "Academic vs. biological age in research on academic careers: a large-scale study with implications for scientifically developing systems," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(6), pages 3543-3575, June.
    6. Malte Hückstädt, 2023. "Ten reasons why research collaborations succeed—a random forest approach," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(3), pages 1923-1950, March.
    7. Cinzia Daraio & Simone Di Leo & Loet Leydesdorff, 2022. "Using the Leiden Rankings as a Heuristics: Evidence from Italian universities in the European landscape," LEM Papers Series 2022/08, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    8. Richard Estes, 2007. "Development challenges and opportunities confronting economies in transition," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 83(3), pages 375-411, September.
    9. David P Baker & Abdul Basit Adeel & Juan José Moradel-Vásquez & Bea Treena Macasaet & Justin J. W. Powell & Julian Prieto & Jennifer Dusdal & Jun Pang & Yuan Chih Fu, 2026. "Deepening and broadening knowledge after the PISA scientific event: bibliometric, semantic network, and expert analyses of scientization in education research," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 13(1), pages 1-14, December.
    10. Martin Baily & David Byrne & Aidan Kane & Paul Soto, 2025. "Generative AI at the Crossroads: Light Bulb, Dynamo, or Microscope?," Papers 2505.14588, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2025.
    11. Stefan Wallaschek & Kavyanjali Kaushik & Monika Verbalyte & Aleksandra Sojka & Giuliana Sorci & Hans-Jörg Trenz & Monika Eigmüller, 2022. "Same Same but Different? Gender Politics and (Trans-)National Value Contestation in Europe on Twitter," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(1), pages 146-160.
    12. Peter Grajzl & Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl & Katarina Zajc, 2016. "Inside post-socialist courts: the determinants of adjudicatory outcomes in Slovenian commercial disputes," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 41(1), pages 85-115, February.
    13. Alex J. Yang & Hongcun Gong & Yuhao Wang & Chao Zhang & Sanhong Deng, 2024. "Rescaling the disruption index reveals the universality of disruption distributions in science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(1), pages 561-580, January.
    14. Rainer Frietsch & Sonia Gruber & Lutz Bornmann, 2025. "The definition of highly cited researchers: the effect of different approaches on the empirical outcome," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 130(2), pages 881-907, February.
    15. Lutz Bornmann, 2026. "Identifying seminal books in sociology using reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS): do the results agree with experts’ identifications?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 131(1), pages 733-752, January.
    16. Li, Xian & Du, Haixing & Bu, Yi & Ai, Mingshu & Huang, Junjie & Jia, Tao, 2025. "Innovation lineage structure: A graph structure in publications of scholars and its association with disruptiveness," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 19(4).
    17. Lutz Bornmann, 2024. "Skewed distributions of scientists’ productivity: a research program for the empirical analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(4), pages 2455-2468, April.
    18. Ingemar Elander, 2022. "Urban Renewal, Governance and Sustainable Development: More of the Same or New Paths?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(3), pages 1-7, January.
    19. Peter Grajzl, 2014. "Behind the Courts’ Walls: Empirical Insights from Slovenia," ifo DICE Report, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 12(03), pages 39-44, October.
    20. Dimitrova-Grajzl Valentina & Grajzl Peter & Zajc Katarina & Sustersic Janez, 2012. "Judicial Incentives and Performance at Lower Courts: Evidence from Slovenian Judge-Level Data," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 215-252, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nos:vgmu00:2021:i:6:p:84-102. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Irina A. Zvereva (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://vgmu.hse.ru/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.