What is it about?

Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at modernizing the public administrations of Member States (MSs) have long since been a priority area of the EU's economic policy. Since the 1990s, these reforms have been sharply intensified across European countries with the declared purpose of enhancing economy, efficiency and effectiveness in their national public sectors’ organizations. In line with the European Commission's recent research initiatives in search for novel quantitative data on NPM in the EU, this paper studies European parties’ NPM reform rhetoric. More specifically, it investigates the MSs’ institutional, economic and political context within which parties have declared their intention of reforming national administrative systems. Thus, it sheds light on the MSs’ domestic factors that are associated with the diffusion of the NPM values across the political discourse of EU's national parties.

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Why is it important?

Recent studies have shown that the European Commission has struggled to enact NPM reforms at member states' national level without the support of national political parties, which play a crucial role in building electoral consensus around NPM's values and in effectively transforming them into national administrative reform plans. The major contribution of this paper consists in providing empirical evidence of the patterns of diffusion of NPM values across the political manifestos of European parties. This contribution follows the ongoing research initiatives supported by the European Commission, seeking for novel and systematic quantitative data on NPM across Europe

Perspectives

The modernization of national public administrations has long since been a priority of EU economic policy. Recent studies have showed that European Commission strives to enact administrative reforms in the domestic contexts of the member states without the political support of national parties which are required to build electoral consensus around reform values and transform them into executive reform plans. This article allows learning more about the institutional, economic and political factors which might have influenced parties’ support to NPM-style reforms.

Mr Giovanni Esposito
Universite de Liege

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This page is a summary of: ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGE IN THE EU: A CROSS-COUNTRY EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE CONTEXTUAL DETERMINANTS OF NPM REFORM RHETORIC, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, August 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/apce.12142.
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