This article applies broad conceptual categories of comparative politics to the explanation of administrative reforms in Italy. It argues about some lines of influence on public sector reform of the features of the party system, the executive-legislative balance, the politicians-bureaucrats relationship, and the role of administrative law. In the search for explanations of the trajectory of administrative reform, pre-existing political and institutional factors are to be interpreted also through the lens of negotiated change via processes of layering of new and old institutions and conversion that took place in Italy since the ‘political crisis’ started in 1992.