Patterns of administrative integration in the European Union: a cross-country empirical analysis of political intentions to reform national public administrations (1997-2011)

Abstract

In the aftermath of the worst financial and economic crisis in generations, the modernization of public administrations of the EU's Member States (MSs) is among the structural reforms recommended by the European Commission to relaunch growth in the European economy. This type of reforms has a longstanding tradition in the MSs as they sharply intensified during the 1990s following the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM). Indeed, by backing NPM-style reforms, the European Commission has fostered convergence between the administrative systems of the MSs based on a soft strategy of integration where, instead of establishing binding pan-European rules enforced directly in all the MSs, it has set a number of regulatory standards implemented in the MSs with the support of national legislators and political parties. This paper empirically addresses the above-mentioned process of soft integration by unveiling the domestic determinants that have led MSs' political parties to call for NPM-style reforms in their national contexts between 1997 and 2011. The hypothesis tested in this study is that MSs' political parties have called for NPM-style reforms in order to respond to specific challenges issuing from the macro-economic, institutional and political configuration of their domestic contexts. The contribution of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it contributes to a better understanding of the process of European administrative integration by providing robust empirical evidence about the patterns of diffusion NPM-style reforms across the MSs of the EU. On the other hand, the empirical evidence provided by this paper for the comprehension of NPM-style reforms in the context of the EU also contributes to a better understanding of some traditional theories addressing the reasons of the worldwide striking international trend of the NPM paradigm.