Public management reform and modernization: trajectories of administrative change in Italy, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain

Since the 1980s, a wave of reforms of public management has swept across the world. A larger and larger, and fast-growing, literature in the field has addressed questions about the nature of such phenomenon, the scope, the reasons for change, and the effects (Aucoin, 1990; Barzelay, 2001; Dunleavy and Hood, 1994; Ferlie et al., 1996; Ferlie et al., 2005; Hood, 1991 and 1998; Kettl, 2000; Lynn, 1996; Olsen and Peters, 1996; Peters, 2001; Peters and Savoie, 1998; Pollitt, 1993; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). However, the empirical bases for such studies appear to be unbalanced: whilst some countries have received great attention from academics, think tanks and practitioners alike (countries like Australia , New Zealand and the United Kingdom, where the New Public Management - NPM - originated, together with the USA and other Anglo-Saxon , or North European countries, like The Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries, sometimes proposed as an alternative to the Anglo-American ‘managerial’ model ) the study of public management reform in other countries has apparently been relatively neglected . This book provides an account of the reforms of public management in five European (and EU-member) countries: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain. The rationale of this book is to contribute to fill such a gap by providing a comparative study of the reforms in these five countries. The ambition is to revisit a number of topics of theoretical interest in the scientific debate in public management, including: the ways the national politico-administrative context affects the dynamics of public management reform, and the influence of Europeanization on public management reform; the ‘compatibility’ of the NPM and other ‘global’ paradigms of reform (like the ‘New Public Governance’, Osborne, 2006) with the basic premises of the administrative systems of the countries in the Napoleonic tradition (intended as a contribution to the larger debate on the compatibility of global paradigms outside the countries where they originate, and particularly of NPM outside the Anglo-American world); the characteristics and evolving features of such tradition; and the direction of reforms, and specifically whether the idea of the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) as an emerging model of reform of the public sector in continental European countries (proposed by Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004, pp. 99-101) may effectively describe and/or interpret the direction of reforms in such countries.