Changes in the Centres of Deconcentrated Public Administration Bodies after 1990

Abstract

In the competition between cities, the leaders of individual settlements, motivated by different reasons, strive to increase the number of public administration bodies in their cities and to establish new institutions there. The study, on the one hand, provides a brief overview of the history of the deconcentrated public administration bodies, and discusses the regional characteristics of the organisational transformations after the political changes, taking five moments in time (the middle of 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2007, respectively) as the basis. Ön the other hand, using the same five snapshots in time, it examines which settlements ex- perienced favourable or unfavourable changes, and what factors influenced the selection of the seat for there institutions.

The most important findings of the study could be summarised as follows:

- The adjustment of the territorial structure of the deconcentrated public administration bodies to the planning-statistical regions was commenced in the late 1990s, after the National Regional Development Concept was adopted and the regional development act was amended; however, the biggest changes were only implemented at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007.

- In the 1990s, the territorial structure of the deconcentrated public administration bodies was in line with the subsequent planning-statistical regions only in the Dél- Dunántúl and the Dél-Alföld Regions. In Észak-Magyarország, Közép-Magyarország and Észak-Alföld, the other spatial structures were much stronger by this time, while in Közép-Dunántúl and Nyugat-Dunántúl there was no deconcentrated public administration organisation in this period the territorial structure of which would have complied with the subsequent planning-statistical regions.

- In the period examined, no significant changes took place on the top and at the bottom of the list according to the number of seats. Among the winning settlements it is mainly Székesfehérvár, Eger and Nyíregyháza should be mentioned, while those on the losing end included Szolnok and Zalaegerszeg.

- The selection of the seat for the newly established regional centres of the deconcentrated public administration bodies can be fundamentally traced back to three factors: the po- litical stance of the individual settlements, their roles as regional centres and their sizes.