Governance Reforms in Visegrád Countries (The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia)

This chapter evaluates the impact of governance reforms on the outcomes of public administration and policy in three of the four countries belonging to the so-called Visegrád Group: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. Institutional theory, path dependence theory, and the theory of the post-accession crisis were applied to explain the governance reforms in these Visegrád countries. We used Worldwide Governance Indicators to analyze the development of public administration reforms. The results confirm the existence of the already described phenomenon of the “post-accession crisis”—recent progress is rather limited due to more critical factors, which have both institutional and path dependence origins.