Comparative Public Administration in Europe: Traditions, Reforms, and the Path to Convergence

Introduction to Comparative Public Administration: Administrative Systems and Reforms in Europe

Third Revised, Updated, and Expanded Edition of the Textbook “Introduction to Comparative Public Administration: Administrative Systems and Reforms in Europe“,
co-authored by Sabine Kuhlmann, Hellmut Wollmann and Renate Reiter.

Comparative Public Administration (CPA) deals with a wide variety of topics and research areas including organizational structures, formal and informal administration rules, bureaucracy, ministerial and civil servant elites, the politicization of different public administrations or, also the comparison of administrative decision processes, their results, and effects. Europe is a particularly interesting area for comparatively examining these topics and areas. Here, varying administrative models meet, based on different state-administrative traditions. Over the past decades, European nation states, within the EU-European administrative setting, have converged in their administrative reform policy discourses as a result of being confronted with the similar challenges – permanent modernization, performance control and development, democratic foundation, crisis management. And yet, they continue to follow long-term national paths in the concrete development of reform strategies and the implementation of reforms.

The third edition of ‘Introduction into Comparative Public Administration. Administrative Systems and Reforms in Europe’ takes up the current state of CPA provides basic knowledge for an understanding of public administration in Europe. It is guided by the assumption that a national administrative system can only be adequately understood if it is contrasted with or compared to other administrative models. The authors are convinced that merely assuming a national perspective on public administration, albeit certainly an important and indispensable perspective, does not do justice to today’s socio-economic development characterized by internationalization and globalization. One needs to look at the broader picture – and this, we suggest, also means being receptive to disciplinary openness.

The study of public administration, in fact, demands recourse to several subdisciplines of the social sciences (political science, law, economics, history, sociology and psychology). This not only requires the incorporation of different disciplinary approaches and methods but is particularly demanding in terms of the theoretical underlying of analysis and the (further) formation of concept and theory. Neo-institutionalism is a suitable cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for this. The third edition of this book – like the previous editions – uses this theoretical framework to comparatively analyse common challenges for European public administrations and administrative systems in their most recent developments, to identify common lines of discourse for reform strategies and to (further) elaborate diverging reform policies and implementation paths and effects. In this third edition, the focus is once again on the countries (France and Italy, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, Hungary) examined in the previous editions, based on varying administrative models.

The book is divided into six main chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the basic questions and founding assumptions of the book. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the theories and analytical approaches of CPA. This includes an introduction to different subject areas and research foci (‘law families’, administrative cultures; local government systems; politicization of administration, civil service systems; Europeanization of administrative systems and international public administration). Moreover, it provides an outline of the key administrative profiles in Europe (Continental European Napoleonic, Continental European federal, Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Central Eastern European). In addition, Chapter 2 is devoted to the presentation of administrative reform policy and the neo-institutionalist explanations of the administrative reforms that are discussed in the subsequent chapters.

In Chapter 3, administrative systems and traditions in six European countries are presented using a uniform scheme that addresses the following aspects: basic features of the government system, fundamental structures of national/central and subnational/local administration, and characteristics of public service. The six selected countries represent distinctive variants of public administration traditions across Europe whose spectrum is thus approximately mapped. The chapter concludes with a comparative overview of the basic features of public administration on the basis of relevant statistical data and by embedding these six countries in a broader OECD context.

Chapter 4 of the book deals with various areas of administrative reforms from a comparative perspective. After an introduction to the administrative reform policy-related discourses of the previous three decades, five areas of reform are considered more closely:

the decentralization and/or re-centralization of state and administration, whereby a distinction is made between political and administrative decentralization, regionalization and (quasi-) federalization as well as administrative deconcentration;
territorial reforms and inter-municipal cooperation that have occurred in particular on a subnational administrative level;
the privatization of public functions that has been embarked upon in many countries, in particular as part of the NPM debate, but has recently been, in part, modified by a trend towards ‘remunicipalization’ and a partial comeback of the public sector;
the modernization of internal structures and procedures of public administration as well as public service/public personnel that have also been strongly shaped by the NPM concept (performance management, performance measurement and comparison, agencification, customer orientation, and civil service reform). The more recent shift from NPM to the Neo-Weberian State model is also discussed; and
the digitalization of public administration as the most important international mega-trend of administrative modernization in the Post-NPM era.

When analyzing these five areas of reform, the impact of current (poly-)crises, in particular financial and economic crises, the migration crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, as triggers, drivers or contextual factors for the reforms is also discussed.

Chapter 5 contains a summary of the findings guided by the questions of whether and why there has (or has not) been a convergence of administrative systems in Europe has occurred before Chapter 6, finally, provides an outlook and some thoughts and recommendations on future research in Comparative Public Administration.

Overall, the analysis points to a convergent development of national reform discourses, e.g. with regard to the central reform models (NPM, post-NPM, neo-Weberian state) and orientations (e.g. in terms of territorial and intergovernmental reforms, public sector reform, administrative modernisation). At the same time, it suggests national path-dependent developments in reform implementation. Neo-institutionalism, with its different perspectives – sociological, rational choice, actor-centred and historical – serves as a helpful theoretical basis for a differentiated explanation of the observed developments.