Authors: Caspar van den Berg, Frits van der Meer, Trui Steen Presenter: Caspar van den Berg Public management reform in Western countries in the past two decades has invariably been aimed at increasing public service... [ view full abstract ]
Authors: Caspar van den Berg, Frits van der Meer, Trui Steen
Presenter: Caspar van den Berg
Public management reform in Western countries in the past two decades has invariably been aimed at increasing public service performance in an environment that is getting ever more complex, while at the same time bringing down costs and keeping up, or increasing, levels of legitimacy. This paper examines public sector reform from a personnel perspective by comparatively analysing the experiences in Britain, Canada, France, Belgium/Flanders, Denmark, Finland, Germany and The Netherlands over the period 1995-2015. Our sample brings together countries from the Anglo-; Napoleonic, Nordic and Germanic political-administrative traditions.
Our cross-time cross-country analysis demonstrates that where public management reform is concerned, for each country there is a discernible rhetorical line (images, labels, values, justifications) and an empirical line. In the course of the period studied, an increasing disconnect between these rhetorical and empirical lines present themselves, in the sense that subsequent governments (depending on their political colour or on what is political opportune at a given moment) have employed various types of rhetoric (NPM, joined-up government, Big Society, Schlanke Staat, Third Way, Enabling State, Caring Society, etc. etc.) but that the empirical line is relatively linear, constant, and/or predictable: A shrinking of the public service, retreat of the state / privatization of activities where is it politico-societally possible (utility sectors, defence, development aid, spatial planning), combined with growth of the public service, expansion of the state where it is politico-societally possible (safety and security, health care, education).
The rhetorical line generally differs between governments leaning more left or right, but that the empirical line shows remarkably little variation between more left- or more right-leaning governments. In other words, there seems to be an on-stage party-politicisation of public sector reforms, but in practice we see a depoliticization, or lock-in, when it comes to public sector reform.
In our paper, we pay specific attention to the personnel-factor of the public sector, both in a quantitative sense (in which sectors are growth or decreases observable?) and in a qualitative sense (implications for expectations and role conceptions of public servants).
