Institutional Changes and Shifting Roles: Local Government Reform in Hungary, 2010–2014

Abstract

After decades of the Communist regime and the Soviet-type council system, a decentralized local government system was introduced in Hungary in 1990. As autonomy at the local level was considered a cornerstone of democracy, local governments gained wide autonomy in terms of their constitutional protection, service-providing competencies and (formal) financial capacities. The extensive decentralization which occurred during the democratic transition resulted in many deficiencies on the sub-national level: the local level was highly fragmented into more than 3,000 local units without any substantive differentiation in tasks between them, while the middle level (county governments) was designed to be weak with basic service-providing tasks, and thus could not become a strategic planner and coordinator of the regions (see Dobos, 2016). In relation to their tasks, the local governments were under-financed and the fragmented local level could not provide services in a cost effective manner. Based on the initial experiences of the local governments’ functioning, scholars and practitioners rapidly came to a consensus about the need for reform of the sub-national institutions (Pálné Kovács, 2016a). However, as the prerequisite of a comprehensive local reform was the political consensus of the national parties (as any major changes required a two thirds majority in the parliament), successive national governments were forced to use financial measures to lessen the fragmentation and to enhance the effectiveness of the system (see Dobos, 2020).