IPSA 26th World Congress as Seen by Associate Professor Éva Ványi

IPSA 26th World Congress is one of the most prestigious conferences in political science. The annual conference was organized in a virtual format due to COVID-19 pandemic between 10-14 July 2021.

My paper was approved in the panel entitled Political and Policy Consequences of Technocracy Around the World led by Elena Semenova. I gave a presentation on Changeable technocratic tendencies in the Hungarian cabinets after 2010 that dealt with the appearance of technocrats in the Hungarian governments after 2010. The research question focused on the role of importance of outsiders in political decision-making.

In my presentation, I investigated and analyzed the role of non-political experts among ministers and state secretaries, as well as possible explanations for their emergence in government decision-making after 2010. The appearance of experts outside of politics in governments is not a new phenomenon in politics. Expert ministers have been appointing in Hungarian governments since the regime change. However, the Orbán governments after 2010 show a new phenomenon: outsiders with special professional knowledge appeared not only among ministers but also among political state secretaries. This phenomenon is related to the restructuring of government. Responsibilities of political state secretaries were changed in the new system, some of them are responsible for special policy field. On the one hand, the new structure justifies the appearance of secretaries’ expertise in policy-making, and on the other hand, in the legal sense, a political state secretary is a political leader, not an expert position in the government, i.e. does not necessarily justify professional knowledge. The presentation (paper) analyzed ministers’ and state secretaries’ pre-career paths before their appointment; their tenured time in the office, and their political and / or professional embeddedness.

Papers in the panel were discussed by researchers with expertise in technocrats in government topic. The paper will be revised based on the comments received from panel discussants and participants. The first draft version of the paper will be finalized during the autumn and it will be discussed in the Elite Research Centre at the Department of Political Science.