Public Management Reforms in Countries with a Napoleonic State Model: France, Italy and Spain

This chapter addresses a main theme of this book: the influence of various institutional settings of states and administrations on the way public management ideas and practices are implemented. Different historical-institutional backgrounds of European states and administration do affect the form and content of their administrative reform. Western states and administrations do differ considerably in many relevant respects. That influences the path of their administrative ‘public management’ reforms (Kickert, 1997, 2000; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). This chapter will concentrate on the administrative reforms in three European countries that significantly differ from the Anglo-Saxon state model, that is, on the three European countries — France, Italy and Spain — that have a Napoleonic state tradition. In comparison to the relative success of New Public Management (NPM) reforms in Anglo-Saxon countries, France shows more modest examples of that type of reform and Italy and Spain are relative ‘failures’ in terms of NPM reforms. One of the explanations for this difference is that Anglo-Saxon state models differ from continental European legal state traditions, such as reflected in the Napoleonic model (Wunder, 1995). France forms its origin and Italy and Spain have adopted the Napoleonic model.