Tradition and Public Administration

by Painter, Martin; Peters, B. Guy

• ISBN13: 9780230575660
• ISBN10: 0230575668
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-22
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Contemporary administrative reforms push administrative systems to homogenize. This book documents, however, the persistence of administrative traditions in a number of countries that tend to maintain existing administrative patterns and reduce the impact of pressures for reform.

Author Biography

Martin Painter is Chair Professor of Public Administration at City University of Hong Kong. He is currently researching regulatory reform in East and Southeast Asia, autonomy and control in Hong Kong government bodies and adoption of Western models of public management in China and Vietnam. Recent publications include Challenges to State Policy Capacity: Tradition and Transformation in the Thai Bureaucracy, Critique Internationale and Administrative Reform in China's Central Government - How Much `Learning from the West'? International Review of Administrative Science.
B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of Government at the University of Pittsburgh, USA and also Distinguished Professor of Comparative Governance at Zeppelin University, Germany. He has published extensively on comparative public policy and comparative public administration.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures	p. x
Notes on Contributors	p. xi
Introduction
The Analysis of Administrative Traditions	p. 3
How can we understand the legacy of the Past?	p. 4
What variables can define the traditions?	p. 6
Traditions and change	p. 8
Four reasons for analyzing administrative traditions	p. 10
Outline of the book	p. 13
Empirical Analysis of Administrative Traditions
Administrative Traditions in Comparative Perspective: Families, Groups and Hybrids	p. 19
Anglo-American	p. 20
Napoleonic	p. 21
Germanic	p. 22
The Scandinavian Tradition	p. 23
Latin America	p. 23
Postcolonial South Asia and Africa	p. 24
East Asian	p. 25
Soviet	p. 27
Islamicist	p. 28
conclusions	p. 30
Checks and Balance in China's Administrative Traditions: A Preliminary Assessment	p. 31
Evolution of the traditional Chinese administrative system	p. 32
Notions of 'organizing' government in imperial China	p. 38
The administrative legacy and its implications	p. 40
Concluding remarks	p. 42
Administrative Tradition in India: Issues of Convergence, Persistence, Divergence and Challenges	p. 44
Ancient and medieval India	p. 46
Indo-British administration: From the East India Company to the British Raj	p. 47
Administrative development in the postindependence period	p. 49
India's administrative culture: Inheritances under stress?	p. 51
Democratic decentralization through people's participation	p. 52
Administration in the liberalized era: Issues of Convergence and divergence	p. 53
Conclusions: Persistence and challenge	p. 55
Traditions and Bureauracy in Bangladesh	p. 57
A neocolonial bureaucracy	p. 58
Administrative reform in Bangladesh	p. 61
Drivers and impediments to reform	p. 65
Conclusion: Bureaucracy as usual	p. 66
Where Administrative Traditions are Alien: Implications for Reform in Africa	p. 69
Factors explaining African governance institutions	p. 70
The colonial administrative legacy	p. 71
The transformation of administration after independence	p. 74
The Anglophone experience in comparative perspective	p. 79
Implications for public sector reform	p. 80
Conclusions	p. 83
Legacies Remembered, Lessons Forgotten: The Case of Japan	p. 84
Introduction	p. 84
Transplants, hybrids and administrative traditions	p. 85
Confucian and continental: Meiji Japan and the modernaization project	p. 87
Sectionalism, transcendence and the 'democratic irritant'	p. 91
Conclusion	p. 96
Public Service Bargains in British Central Government: Multiplication, Diversification and Reassertion?	p. 99
The traditional public service bargain - broken and discarded?	p. 100
Multiplication and diversification of public service bargains at the center	p. 105
Layering and interaction effects	p. 109
Conclusion	p. 110
Public Administration in the United States: Anglo-American, Just American, or Which American?	p. 114
The Anglo-American tradition	p. 115
American exceptionalism	p. 117
American unexceptionalism	p. 123
The future - directions for reform?	p. 125
Summary - conflict of doctrine and reality	p. 126
The Fate of Administrative Tradition in Anglophone Countries during the Reform Era	p. 129
Approaches to administrative tradition	p. 130
Anglophone family	p. 133
Reform and country consequences	p. 134
Impact of reform	p. 138
Implications and conclusions	p. 141
Legacy Effects: Administrative Reform and administrative Tradition
The Future of Administrative Tradition: Tradition as Ideas and Structure	p. 145
Administrative tradition in models of administrative reform	p. 146
Conceptualizing administrative traditions	p. 148
The causal mechanisms of administrative traditions	p. 151
Conclusion	p. 155
Path-Dependent and Path-Breaking Changes in the French Administrative System: The Weight of Legacy Explanations	p. 158
Path-dependency mechanisms in the French administration: The Weight of institutional legacies	p. 159
Budgetary reform: Path-breaking change in the French context	p. 167
Conclusion	p. 172
The Napoleonic Administrative Tradition and Public Management Reform in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain	p. 174
Relationship of state and society	p. 174
Connection of the state to social actors	p. 176
Relationship of the public bureaucracy to other institutions of the state	p. 177
The importance of law as distinct from management	p. 179
Accountability: The role of law as the primary mechanism for controlling bureaucracy	p. 180
Current features of the Napoleonic administrative tradition	p. 180
Do contemporary administrative systems in the five countries reflect a clearly identifiable common underlying tradition?	p. 184
Implications for public management reform	p. 185
Conclusion	p. 189
Administrative Reform in Sweden: The Resilience of Administrative Traditions?	p. 191
The Swedish case in global perspective	p. 192
The trajectory of administrative reform in Sweden	p. 193
Conclusions: The resilience of administrative traditions in Sweden	p. 199
In Search of the Shadow of the Past: Legacy Explanations and Administrative Reform in Post-Communist East Central Europe	p. 203
Civil service governance in post-communist Hungary	p. 206
'Goulash Communism' and the first civil service reform in post-communist Hungary	p. 209
Civil service governance and the indirect effect of the communist legacy	p. 211
Conclusion	p. 214
The New Member States of the European Union: Constructed and Historical Traditions and Reform Trajectories	p. 217
European traditions and the benchmarking approach: Towards a constructed Tradition?	p. 218
'New Europeans': Towards the European administrative tradition?	p. 223
Possible causes and likely trajectories	p. 228
Constructed and historical traditions	p. 232
Conclusion: Administrative Traditions in an Era of Administrative Change	p. 234
Patterns of Change	p. 235
References	p. 238
Index	p. 263
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