Failing Policies or Failing Politicians? Policy Failures in Hungary

Existing research results concerning governments’ failure to run effective policies mainly concern, and emanate from, Western democracies. Therefore, it is not surprising that problems of the so-called transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are little discussed and understood. The article’s aim is to narrow this gap in knowledge by analyzing policy failures from one of the region’s countries, Hungary. The article proposes three, possibly novel, types of policy failure. The first one originates from an unusually strong imbalance between policymakers’ personal interests and the formal policy goals, reflecting the lack of even a minimum level of the (party) political elites’ ability to counteract centrifugal forces driven by individual interests. The second type of failure — coined “regulatory impotence” — is related to a dysfunctionally strong protection of lawbreakers’ right to fair procedure vis-à-vis the state. Finally, the third factor of policy failure, “implementation bargain,” emerges when key implementation actors, even in the lack of a proper legal mandate, set out to bargain and strike deals among themselves about the extent to which they are going to implement the given policy.