Mission
Policy studies represents a theoretically important area of political science, as well as one with momentous significance from a practical perspective. Extending beyond political science, policy studies builds on knowledge from public administration, organizational theory, legal studies, and economics. The establishment of the Department of Government and Public Policy was a response to the limited research on policy studies within Hungarian political science. As the leading research center in the field, the Institute for Political Science has a duty and responsibility to assist in the advancement of policy studies. For this reason, the Department’s most crucial endeavor is the analysis of the Hungarian policy process in light of the most recent developments in public policy.
The members of the department specifically study the theoretical and practical dimensions of governance, such as governments and legislative affairs, the politics of public administration and policy analysis, the decisive factors for government performance and the study of the political factors influencing policy change. Additional areas that the work of the department emphasizes include: new governing approaches and trends (participatory aspects, populism, new public management), evaluations of elements of the policy cycle (agenda setting, decision making and implementation challenges), and related topical, regional, and historical subjects (regional inequality and regional development, education and social policy, migration).
The Department’s researchers engage in comparative research projects in addition to the analysis of Hungarian public policy (for example, the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project), projects evaluating European Union integration (EP representatives, the Europeanization of Hungarian public policy, EU development policy), and participation in international research networks on the political economy of the East-Central European region, as well as global political economy.
Department Chair: András BÍRÓ-NAGY
Members of the Department: