1 Politico-Administrative Relations in Slovakia and Hungary: Road to professionalization of Civil Service? Authors: Katarína Staroňová and Gyorgy Gajduschek 1 1. Introduction A professional civil service is the cornerstone of an effectively performing public sector. Politicization is generally seen as the primary impediment to successful administrative development (Verheijen 2001; Pierre and Peters 2001), as it runs contrary to the principles of merit, professionalism and permanence that are essential foundations of a functioning civil service. The transition of Central and Eastern European countries into modern democracies in the past two decades brought a lot of questions and problems connected with institutional redesign, including questions regarding the clear division between political and administrative officials. This interaction between elected politicians and the permanent career civil servants is a central theme of institutional politics. The relations between these two actors at the centre of government affects the capacity of governments to make and implement policies to the extent expected from modern political systems. The relationship between politicians and civil servants is of particular relevance for the new EU member countries from Central and Eastern Europe. In the last years prior to EU accession reforms were conducted in candidate states to bring about the formalization of politico-administrative relations and compliance with the “principles of the European Administrative Space”. These principles of European public administration were developed by the EU and Sigma as part of the EU‟s attempt to develop an overall public administration reform policy (SIGMA 1998, 1999), which could help applicant countries to meet the Copenhagen and Madrid criteria. Generally, these reforms have progressed slowly and although measures have been introduced that would hinder the politicians to appoint and dismiss senior officials at their will in most CEE countries (Verheijen 2006; Malíková and Staroňová 2005), the civil service systems in CEE countries remain incompatible with the principles of professionalism and neutrality. There had been very little change in the period after the accession in 2004 in the overall situation, and even those progressive measures often seem to be short-lived. A recent SIGMA study, which examined CEE civil service reforms, concluded that there is: 1) continued politicization; 2) an ongoing failure to create a professional merit based system; and 3) a lack of effective measures to improve the quality and stability of staffing through appropriate recruitment remuneration, promotion and career development arrangements. This paper describes and analyzes the civil service system of Hungary and Slovakia. These countries have been chosen as they depict different routes of civil service reforms – in Hungary starting gradually with regime change while in Slovakia starting rapidly, mainly under pressure from the EU. Still the outcome is the same; the degree of politicization is increasing. Most of the features depicted below on the two countries at hand could be also found in other post-communist EU member countries (Meyer-Sahling 2008; Dimitrova 2010). We approach the issue at hand both from a diachronic and a synchronic point of view. First we try to sum up the most important facts on the two countries. Then we analyze the facts and try to identify how attributes of the civil service system differ from most of EU-15 countries, 1 Katarina Staronova, Institute of Public Policy and Economics, Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia (staronova@governance.sk) and Gyorgye Gajduschek, Social Research Center, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (gajduschek@gmail.com).