As widely recognized in the literature, one of the major drivers for the so-called public sector reforms operated since the early 1980s has been the financial crisis and the consequent need to initiate cutback strategies.
In this context, it comes as no surprise that several recent studies have been concluding that the recent financial crisis is also producing impacts on public governance processes in several countries. These studies indicate, nevertheless, that there have been different national strategies to cope with the current financial crisis, not only on economy itself, but also regarding the levels of state interventionism, centralization, politicization and inter-ministerial coordination. Moreover, it has also been concluded that the kind of strategies each country adopts depend largely, not only on the severity of the crisis, but also on the national administrative culture.
Taking the aforementioned parameters into consideration, this paper analyses the impacts on public governance processes of the cutbacks that have been taken in Portugal which, as widely reported, has been one of the European countries most affected by the current crisis and has had a late, and somehow incipient, public sector reform.
To do so, we will first describe the path of the public sector reform in Portugal for the past decades and the features which describe our political and administrative apparatus, as well as the cutback measures that have been taken in Portugal since 2009 and the consequences of these in patterns of public management and governance, such as the power distribution and the reform focus. After this preliminary section, we will try to reflect on the factors that influenced the adoption of those cutback measures, particularly trying to understand the role the international institutions, such as the IMF and the EU, and the administrative culture have played.
Thereunto, we will not only analyze the main national socio-economic indicators through official statistics, as well as the documents in which the cutback measures are described and somehow explained, but also the results of the launching of COCOPS executive survey on 296 Portuguese top public managers.
The analysis reveals the main reforms were fostered by the Memoranda of Understanding signed between the Portuguese Government and Troika (IMF, ECB and EC), altough there has been several changes to this document considering following social protests and Constitutional Court decisions. Moreover, during the crisis period there has been an increasing centralization and politicisation of decision-making processes, combined with more power attributed to the Ministry of Finances.
