Three Essays on the Politics of Reorganization and Public Management

Reorganization in public administration is an expression of bureaucratic and institutional politics, as well as a response to crises. Public leadership can also exert pressure on citizens’ perceptions of crises, building political capital for institutional politics and creating room for reform. However, when politically construed, such reforms need not increase system efficiency or performance, and they can even be counterproductive. The three essays of this dissertation address critical issues in the scholarship of public management and reorganization using a diverse range of research methodologies. The first essay conducts a systematic review of the literature on reorganization in the public sector to provide a clearer theoretical picture of its definitions and determinants. It discovers that political considerations are virtually always behind explanations based on efficiency, managerial rationality, and reactions to external crises, yet public administration and political science scholars have rarely spoken with each other to discuss these issues. The review also highlights a surprising lack in the use of mixed methods to understand the problem of reorganization, which is expected to overcome the limitations of qualitative or quantitative-only approaches. The second essay of this dissertation attempts to do precisely this. Indeed, it seeks to uncover the ‘bureaucratic politics’ behind the efficiency argumentation promoting public health mergers, and it does so by combining a staggered difference-in-difference analysis of quantitative indicators for financial and quality of care outcomes with a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with managerial figures of merged agencies. The combination of the two methodologies enables quantifying a causal effect as well as grasping the mechanisms behind the observed results, some of which go against the expectations of the literature. Finally, the third essay exploits a fortuitous quasi-natural experiment to assess the causal impact of leaders’ public communication concerning the measures taken by the government to counteract a health and economic emergency. As such, it speaks to the literature on blame management following crises, as these can trigger reorganization efforts or result from poorly conceived reorganization reforms. What these essays teach us is that there can be room for improving the design and targeting of reorganization reforms and welfare aid programs as a response to crises, since we observe frequent mismatches between the stated goals and the effective results. Indeed, Essay 2 highlights a limited realization of cost savings and performance improvements following the mergers of public health agencies, whereas Essay 3 shows that fiscal policy measures proposed to face the Covid-19 recession did not convince the targets of these measures. Improving the design of public reforms thus requires a more comprehensive understanding of the theory behind them, as Essay 1 advocated; and by taking stock of interdisciplinary and cross-country comparisons from the past and adopting the new methodologies that have been developed in recent years there is still a lot that policymakers can learn from academic research and vice versa.