Karin Hilmer Pedersen & Lars Johannsen
Associate professors, Ph.D.’s
Department of Political Science
Aarhus School of Business and Social Science
Denmark
Public participation can increase transparency and thus serve as a tool to combat corruption (Rose-Ackerman, 2010). Moreover, values of public participation correlates with enhanced efficiency and equality in service delivery (Johannsen & Pedersen, 2008). Transformation of the state apparatus in the former ’Eastern Block’ of Europe has not been simple nor straightforward. Moreover, now 20 years after the break down of the Soviet regime relative high levels of corruption seems to be a lasting rather than a transitional phenomenon (Transparency international). Challenges are related to the legacy of former Soviet as well as to historically develop administrative practices, but also to ideas of new public management developed in the context of consolidated democracies and regulated market capitalism. While, the Soviet legacy on public administration is an arms length approach to public participation, public participation has been promoted partly as an element of democracy and partly by new public management ideas.
Insights from theories on policy transfer (Bartlett, 1990; Dolowitz & Marsch, 2000), Europeanization (Schmidt, 2010, Radaelli, 2003) and neo-institutionalism (March & Olson, 1989) suggest that domestic responses to ideas generated from abroad will hardly follow identical patterns. On the contrary, different choices in the organisation of public administration and in civil servants’ values on participation and involvement of private parties are expected.
The questions guiding this paper are, if civil servants in the new EU Member States value public participation, if their values differ from the actual organization of public administration and if there is a relation between civil servants views on participation and their perception on corruption within their organization. Empirically the paper is based on a survey conducted by the authors between April and June this year among civil servants in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Data will include responses from 1500 civil servants. The choice of the three Baltic States follows the logic of a ‘most-similar-system’-design facilitating both cross-country and cross-sector comparison.
