As widely recognized in the literature, the public governance processes and structures in the ‘western world’ have undergone several waves of reforms since the 1980s.
Although these trends of reform have been widely disseminated through benchmarking exercises and the influence of several international organizations (e.g., E.U., OECD, IMF), its actual processes of implementation and impacts are different among (groups of) countries. These differences are said to be related with what many authors describe as ‘administrative traditions’, that is, more or less stable and historically based patterns regarding public sector values, structures and relationships.
Likewise, recent studies have been concluding that the recent crisis scenario has propelled several countries to adopt severe reforms but, again, with different directions of change. These studies indicate, for instance, 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.
The process of public sector reform in Portugal is identified as a clear example of this dual influence, since the reform discourse and agenda has been clearly NPM-oriented but the pace and direction of the implemented reforms is said to have been influenced by the Napoleonic features of the country’s public governance scenario. Among these traditional features, one may identify the primacy of legalism, the high levels of political patronage, or the low levels of civil society participation. This hybrid scenario was the one identified before the economic and financial crisis hit the country very badly and an adjustment plan was defined for the country under the bailout programme defined and monitored by the so-called troika.
Although the reform agenda in Portugal has been under increasing attention, there has been a lack of studies on the actual impact of those intended reforms on public sector capacity and performance in Portugal – a gap this paper aims to fill.
To do so, we will cross the analysis from previous studies and the results of the launching of COCOPS executive survey on 371 Portuguese top public managers to identify the main public sector reforms in Portugal for the past decades and the main impacts on public sector performance and capacity. In this process we will particularly focus the topics of politicization, civil society participation, legalism and inter-actor coordination to asses if these traditional Napoleonic features are actually considered as the main barriers for a successful reform process and if there has been a drift from the country’s Napoleonic tradition under the current crisis (and reformist) scenario. This analysis will be comparatively framed with results of COCOPS executive survey launched on public managers from countries with different administrative traditions.
