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Public management reform in countries in the Napoleonic administrative tradition: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain
Edited by Edoardo Ongaro
Administrative systems are, in some ways, the easiest components of the public sector for comparative analysis ([40], [41] Peters, 1988a, b). Public administration in all political systems is organized in a more or less bureaucratic manner, and is responsible for implementing public policy, as well as some additional functions such as policy advice. Despite the apparent similarities of the institutions of public administration, there are also important differences and those differences have crucial significance for the ability of governments to perform their tasks efficiently and effectively. Further, one format for public administration is not necessarily superior to others, but its effectiveness may be a function of how well it fits with other political and social patterns.
One way of creating a more comprehensive explanation of the structure and behavior of public bureaucracies is to develop the concept of administrative traditions. By administrative tradition we mean an historically based set of values, structures and relationships with other institutions that defines the nature of appropriate public administration within society, a definition representing more than a little influence of the normative institutionalism. This concept brings together several characteristics of administrative systems and demonstrates how these elements fit together to create more or less coherent institutions. These characteristics are, as intimated above, in part inherited from the past as well as containing some contemporary adaptations to changed circumstances. Administrative traditions within the developed democracies can be grouped into several broad patterns, although each country has its own particular interpretation of the tradition. Even with the differences within the tradition, however, these patterns provide a means of understanding and interpreting public administration.
The concept of tradition combines some elements of explanation for administrative behavior. For example, traditions have some elements of an administrative culture (see [7] Chan and Clegg, 2002) but yet do not depend entirely or even primarily on cognitive explanations. Further, the concept of administrative traditions contains some elements of institutionalism, but neither is it entirely structuralist in its view of how individuals and organizations behave in government. The concept of administrative tradition has some affinity with historical institutionalism in that it assumes that there is a persistent pattern...