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The article explores the changing patterns of disciplinary orientation in European public administration (PA) education. The study builds on an earlier research, which defined three distinct clusters of countries, based on their specific PA education tradition. It asks whether countries’ movement away from the Legalist paradigm has continued since then and if yes, what were the factors triggering the shift and towards which cluster: corporate or public. The empirical basis of the article is a small-scale expert survey involving ten European countries. The key finding of the research is that since the early 2000s the geographical scope of Legalism in PA teaching has shrunk further with a number of formerly more Legalist-based countries having moved towards at least one of the two alternative clusters. These changes can be attributed to the demonstration effect of the international PA education field and a shift in actual needs triggered by domestic reforms. However, some countries in the response set – notably, Germany and Hungary – seem to remain largely unaffected by these trends and continue on an overwhelmingly Legalist PA education path.

The study attempts to reveal the doctrinal foundations of Hungary’s sweeping sub-national governance reforms (SGRs) that took place in the period 2010-2014. It compares actual SGRs with internationally mainstream doctrines of major contemporary reform, to determine the extent to and the ways in which Hungarian SGRs are a mixture of these trends as opposed to being a novel paradigm of its own. The study concludes that Hungary’s reform path substantially diverges from all three major reform paradigms examined—that is, New Public Management, New Public Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State. We end with the proposition that this deviation is not of an unintended or accidental nature; rather, it seems to be part of a coherent and rationally pursued vision of (sub-national) governance, possibly referred to as “illiberal.”

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