Denis Saint-Martin

Building blocks for a new social architecture: the LEGO TM paradigm of an active society

English Social policy communities now often focus on ‘new social risks’. Despite a clear preference for controlling state spending, they also consider that these risks call for ‘social investments’. Concentration on investments, activation and the future is considered an optimal anchor for redesigning their welfare systems. Convergence around three ideas prompt us to speak of a shift towards a LEGOTM paradigm: learning over the life-course; a future orientation; and the collective benefits of an active society. Just as when Keynesianism was paradigmatic, however, we recognise that divergences exist in the ways that the paradigm is implemented.

Agency, actors and change in a child-focused future: ‘Path dependency’ problematised

This article calls into question the assumptions of leading welfare state theorists who rely on path dependency approaches and ‘permanent austerity’ theses to inform their analyses. In contrast, drawing on public policy approaches that acknowledge paradigm shifts, and feminist state and social movement theorisation, we examine the state/civil society interrelations that have helped to bring about changes in state forms in Canada and Britain. We argue that state/civil society interaction explains the novel patterns that are taking shape in Canada and Britain with the materialisation of a ‘social investment perspective’ and child welfare reform strategy. We examine not only new institutions and new policies, but also new meanings and new roles for different groups.

Between Regulation, Promotion and Consumption: Government and Management Consultancy in Britain

During the 1990s there has been a considerable growth in the literature on management consulting which has paralleled – albeit with a slight time lag – the rapid expansion of consultancy services themselves. It seems that, as time goes by, this literature is adopting an increasingly critical attitude towards consultants. This becomes already apparent when looking at the titles of some recent books on management consultants and gurus, including, for example, The Witch Doctors, Dangerous Company, Con Tricks or Consulting Demons. The change becomes even more obvious when comparing earlier titles which were more positive, such as The Business Healers, or at least neutral, like Management Gurus. Most of the authors of the recent books argue that consultants cost huge sums of money, but produce at best questionable, sometimes even disastrous results. Some of them go even further by stressing that the use of consultancy services might result in a kind of addiction. Martin Ashford, for example, has highlighted the ‘comforting experience’ of hiring consultants, since they allow management to shy away from its own decision-making responsibilities and, if necessary, blame mistakes on somebody else. This, he argues, can easily lead to dependency: ‘Weak managers, allowed to commission consultancy work, can all too easily become hooked on what is the management equivalent of smoking cannabis’. Among the academic scholars, Alfred Kieser has reached similar conclusions (‘consulting is addictive’) by focusing on the fashion-driven nature of consultancy services. These fashions, so he argues, appeal to managers because they reduce their insecurity and provide them with the perception of control. But they are soon replaced by new fashions, which managers need to adopt again to maintain (or regain) their competitive advantage. Thus, he continues, ‘managers who needed consultants to come to grips with the last fashion, in all probability, need consultants again in order to implement

Half a century of “muddling”: Are we there yet?☆

Abstract Half a century after the publication of Lindbloms seminal article “The Science of Muddling Through”, we revisit the heritage of incrementalism in this special issue, analyzing its legacy in public policy and public administration. The articles discuss the extent to which recent theoretical developments have transformed the original idea, reinforced it, or possibly rendered it obsolete. In this introductory article, we provide a short overview over the core elements of incrementalism and assess how the concept is used in scholarly publications and research today. We thereby focus on incrementalism as an analytical concept rather then a prescriptive theory. We argue that even after a half a century of “muddling”, we are not yet through with incrementalism. Some of the ideas that underpin the concept of incrementalism continue to drive research, often in combination with more recent theoretical approaches to the policy process. After half a century, incrementalism is still part of the policy scholars tool kit.

When industrial policy shapes public sector reform: Total quality management in Britain and France

Approaches seeking to explain the development of TQM ideas in government are very much ‘business‐centric’. The goal of this article is to show that in reforming the public sector, policy‐makers did not simply follow the lead of the private sector because ‐ in the case of TQM ‐ the private sector was itself, to some extent at least, led by government. In the mid‐1980s, Britain and France launched nationwide ‘quality initiatives’ which provided money for businesses to buy management consulting expertise. Through the implementation of these policies, consultants built channels of communication with the state, and this subsequently opened possibilities for consultants to help transfer TQM ideas from the industrial policy area to the field of public sector reform.

Path Dependence and Self-Reinforcing Processes in the Regulation of Ethics in Politics: Toward a Framework for Comparative Analysis

Concerns over the erosion of public trust have led British and Canadian parliamentarians to introduce some form of independent element in their arrangements for regulating political ethics, while legislators in the U.S. are refusing to make similar changes even if they also face severe problems of declining confidence in politics. To explain these differences, this chapter shows how ethics regulation processes are self-reinforcing over time, leading to more rules enforced through self-regulation mechanisms or to path-shifting changes where legislatures, hoping to break the ethics inflationary cycle, opt for a more depoliticized form of ethics regulation.

Rationalism and Public Policy: Mode of Analysis or Symbolic Politics?

Abstract This article takes up the distinction between incremental analysis and incremental politics as elaborated by Lindblom in his 1979 article. We argue that while rationalism as a mode of analysis has lost much of its prominence, rationalism as symbolic politics is still very much alive and might even be more present today than it was back when Lindblom wrote his famous 1959 article. The recent shift to new modes of governance whereby elected officials are increasingly delegating decision-making powers to independent bureaucracies – what Majone calls the “regulatory state” or what the British describe as “agencification” or quangoisation” – has created an important legitimacy deficit for those non-majoritarian institutions that exercise political authority without enjoying any direct link to the electoral process. In such a context – and in addition to growing public distrust towards partisan politics – rationalist politics is likely to become more rampant as independent bureaucracies lack the legitimacy to publicly recognize the fundamentally incrementalist – and thus values-laden – nature of their decision-making processes. To develop these ideas, the article looks at the case of “supreme audit institutions”. We argue that the synoptic model is a mean for SAIs to legitimize their shift from classical financial auditing to performance auditing. In comparison to other independent bureaucracies, they are particularly prone to rationalist politics not only because of their institutional independence, but also because of the tradition of financial auditing and the rise of new public management.

Governing without a majority. What consequences in Westminster systems

This special section showcases four papers first presented at a conference organised in November 2010 at the Université de Montréal. The conference’s point of departure was simple: given the political context in several countries with Westminster-style parliamentary institutions, and especially the UK since May 2010, Canada from 2006 until 2010, and Australia in 2010, we asked participants to explore the consequences of minority or coalition Parliaments for the political process. The four articles published here all provide an answer to this question. Contrary to popular impressions and media presentations, experiences with minority and coalition government have been relatively frequent in systems governed by the rules and norms of Westminster. Nonetheless, the embedded notions of politics dominated by the Government and the Opposition mean that such moments in political time are often feared, with minority governments termed ‘hung Parliaments’ in British political discourse. They certainly provoke media attention, sometimes leading to the cliffhanger style of analysis so familiar in Canada that continually asks, ‘will Parliament fall today?’ Surprisingly, however, the consequences of minority and coalition governments in these Westminster systems have not, with a few notable exceptions, attracted sustained attention from political scientists and political sociologists. There is a long tradition and a huge literature, for example, of positing a link between proportional representation and parliamentary outcomes, including those with Westminster-style institutions. Others analyse effects on the strength or stability of government (for example, Cairney, 2011), including the factors that can make minority governments work (Hazall & Paun, 2009,

Systemic Corruption in an Advanced Welfare State: Lessons from the Québec Charbonneau Inquiry

The Quiet Revolution in the 1960s propelled the province of Quebec onto the path of greater social justice and better government. But as the evidence exposed at the Charbonneau inquiry makes clear, this did not make systemic corruption disappear from the construction sector. Rather, it adapted to its new institutional environment and was significantly shaped by the incentives structure it provided. The patterns of corruption emerging from the Charbonneau inquiry bear the imprint of the so-called “Quebec model” inherited from the Quiet Revolution in at least three ways: (i) in the economic nationalism that made public policies partial towards French-speaking and Quebec-based businesses, notably in the engineering sector, with major firms like SNC-Lavalin using their dominant position as “national champions” to engage in cartel-like practices to raise the price of construction projects; (ii) in the Jacobinism that strongly centralized power at the provincial level and left municipalities underdeveloped in terms of bureaucratic capacity, thus making them easy prey for corrupted interests, and (iii) in the sovereignist/federalist cleavage that, since the 1970s, has made Quebec businesses dependent on the Liberal Party for political stability and has allowed party operators to extract a rent from businesses in return.