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New Public Management has been around for a quarter of a century in European public sectors, yet despite the movement’s emphasis on indicators and evidence, there have been surprisingly few encompassing evaluations. In this paper, we provide an overview of academic evaluation and impact studies of entire NPM-style reform programmes. We distinguish between two sets of NPM-style changes and reforms. One is that of specific managerial innovations within public organisations. The other consists of changes to the role of government and citizens as a result of NPM ideas. We conclude that a majority of academic research has focused on the first set of changes, while approaches to the second set has been mainly of a critical nature with relatively limited attention for empirical studies.
Recent decades have seen a range of public sector reforms, focusing on diverse aspects. Some of these reforms have had a structural dimension and include privatisation, downsizing and outsourcing, while others have focused on aspects such as improving access and transparency, collaboration, and innovation. This contribution explores how public sector executives rate administrative reforms in their country on a number of dimensions. It presents preliminary findings from an academic survey among 3,173 top public sector executives in 10 European countries.
This paper analyses how public managers use performance information. A sample of over 3,100 high-level public sector executives from six European countries, provided evidence of significant country variations. Considerable variations were also found in patterns of use in different policy fields; and performance indicators were not used as often in central government as in local and regional government. Implementation of performance management instruments in an organization had a strong effect on the actual use of performance information.
Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public
Sector of the Future : COCOPS project background paper
(2011)
This first COCOPS Working Paper outlines the background to the COCOPS project. It introduces the concept of New Public Management (NPM) both as a set of managerial innovations in the public sector and as a set of new ideas about the role of government. The Paper presents an overview of the state of the art of evaluating the impact of NPM and we argue that there are a number of major gaps in current studies on the impact of NPM reforms. These include limited coverage of European countries and an overall lack of cross-national research, a limited empirical base in many assessments of NPM, and a tendency to focus on specific elements of NPM-style reforms or specific policy sectors rather than on public sector reforms in general. Furthermore, we identify two unintended effects of NPM-style reforms that severely impact the public sector of the future’s ability to build and sustain social cohesion. One is the fragmentation of the public sector; the other consists of effects of the reforms on equity. Innovative practices have to provide an answer to these two challenges. We end this working paper by collating the first tentative empirical evidence of emerging models for the governance of public services beyond NPM, including outcome-based approaches and whole-of-government models, and reflect on the implications of the financial crisis for these developments.
Management tools are often argued to ameliorate public service performance. Indeed, evidence has emerged to support positive outcomes related to the use of management tools in a variety of public sector settings. Despite these positive outcomes, there is wide variation in the extent to which public organizations use management tools. Drawing on normative isomorphism and contingency theory, this article investigates the determinants of both organization‐oriented and client‐oriented management tool use by top public sector executives. The hypotheses are tested using data from a large‐N survey of 4,533 central government executives in 18 European countries. Country and sector fixed‐effects ordinary least squares regression models indicate that contingency theory matters more than normative isomorphism. Public executives working in organizations that are bigger and have goal clarity and executive status are more likely to use management tools. The only normative pressure that has a positive impact on management tool use is whether public sector executives have a top hierarchical position.
This article presents an original research on the use of management tools in central government departments and agencies in 16 European countries. It is based on a survey conducted among senior managers (n = 5,998). The analysis shows that the use of management tools results from a combination of top-down implementation of a list of management tools at the national level, combined with a bottom-up independent selection of tools by administrative units. The variation in management tool use depends on the type of tool. While the uses of a HRM tool, such as performance-related pay, or a financial tool, such as risk management, are heavily influenced by national public management policies, service quality-type tools, such as user surveys or quality management systems, tend to be chosen in a more autonomous manner by different administrative units, especially agencies.
This article assesses the impact of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms in European countries as perceived by top public sector officials. Using data from an executive survey conducted in 20 European countries, we look at the relationship between five key NPM reforms (downsizing, agencification, contracting out, customer orientation and flexible employment practices) and four dimensions of public sector performance: cost efficiency, service quality, policy coherence and coordination, and equal access to services. Structural equation modelling reveals that treating service users as customers and flexible employment are positively related to improvements on all four dimensions of performance. Contracting out and downsizing are both positively related to improved efficiency, but downsizing is also associated with worse service quality. The creation of autonomous agencies is unrelated to performance. This suggests that policy-makers seeking to modernize the public sector should prioritize managerial reforms within public organizations over structural transformations.