Social Political and]Sciences

This ESDN Quarterly Report (QR) is a direct follow-up of the 6 ESDN Workshop in Berlin in early December 2010. It provides an overview of the various measurement approaches in the current “beyond GDP” debate that aim at measuring societal progress with more comprehensive indicators than the economic progress-oriented approaches. The aim of the QR report is to provide an overview of the debate at the conceptual and political level in the measurement initiatives in going “beyond GDP” as well as to outline the challenges ahead in the reforms towards measuring social progress. The QR is mainly based on the ESDN Case Studies No.3 and No.4, the background paper and discussions at the 6 ESDN Workshop in Berlin in December 2010 as well as the report summarising the debates at the workshop.

After the end of the Soviet Union, many post-communist countries have attempted to reform their bureaucratic structures with the twin-goal of reducing political interferences in personnel procedures while increasing their civil servants' professionalization. However, such reforms observed remarkably different results. According to the existing scholarship, two factors should account for such variation: historical legacies (type of administrations) and political competition during the transition period. In this article I first provide a new conceptualization of bureaucratic reforms that, in contrast to the previous works, better grasps the role of politics. Second, I argue that such variation is a product of two factors. On the one hand, the more political parties' organizational strength lies outside the boundaries of the state, the more the country is likely to professionalize and de-politicize their public administrations. On the other hand, ethnical cleavages impede the e...