Civil-Service Reforms and Communist Legacy: The Case of Slovakia

Civil-service reforms in Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) in the last decade have focused on various tools that would decrease politicization and increase the professionalization of civil service, in other words introducing a merit system in the civil service. At the same time, there was a need to attract professionals from practice into the civil service to design and implement other necessary sectoral reforms. Different countries have undertaken different trajectories of reforms. To some extent, Slovakia responded to these challenges and introduced HR reforms in civil service in order to streamline the recruitment and motivate young qualified candidates, reduce high turnover and create senior civil service, such as the “fast stream system” and “nominated civil service”. However, these had only limited success. The creation of functioning human-resource management system and approaches is undoubtedly the main area of failure in civil-service reform, not only in Slovakia but in most CEE countries. This paper seeks to understand these reforms from a historical institutionalist perspective, emphasizing the influence of institutional (communist) legacies on current empirical patterns.