Fabrizio Di Mascio

Fiscal Retrenchment in Southern Europe: Changing patterns of public management in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain

The vulnerability of the four south European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) to the global financial turmoil makes the analysis of their responses to the fiscal crisis particularly interesting for the assessment of the implications of fiscal austerity for public management. Drawing on the historical institutionalist approach, our analysis reveals a picture of variation in the impact of crisis on patterns of public management across south European countries. However, it also shows uniformity in the strategies of retrenchment as in all the four countries under examination governments failed to connect cutback management to ambitious administrative modernization programmes.

Context and Mechanisms in Administrative Reform Processes: Performance Management Within Italian Local Government

ABSTRACT This article aims to present new research on the politics of public management reform in Napoleonic countries. Drawing on the institutional processualist approach, the empirical analysis tracks and explains the trajectory and outcomes of episodes where performance management has been introduced at the local level in Italy. The comparative case analysis shows that plausible causal explanation of the outcomes of public management reform can occur only if researchers are attentive to the interaction between social mechanisms and contextual features together with their interconnections through time.

Analysing the role of ministerial cabinets in Italy: legacy and temporality in the study of administrative reforms

The article explores the transformations which have occurred in ministerial cabinets as entrenched advisory structures in the Italian executive since the early 1990s when the party system collapsed and a permanent cycle of public management reforms was introduced. It examines how ministerial advisers have acquired a greater role in executive coordination filling the void of governing capacity left by the failed institutionalization of the new party system. In doing so, the empirical analysis identifies the constellation of actors that reproduced ministerial cabinets as a legacy of the past in the present set-up of the Italian system, eventually hindering the innovation of governance structures according to international standards. Points for practitioners This article seeks to contribute to the literature on the development of ministerial staff as a key manifestation of increasing public service politicization. With its more nuanced type of legacy explanation, focused on the identification of causal mechanisms that link institutional arrangements and actor choices in reform processes, the article can also contribute to general debates on the role of time in public management. It also recommends an integrated focus on the different policies of civil service reform in order to map interrelations of administrative changes.

Learning-Shaping Crises: A Longitudinal Comparison of Public Personnel Reforms in Italy, 1992‒2014

Abstract This article analyses the attempts to reform public administration, notably personnel management, in Italy between 1992 and 2014, with a focus on implementation and the period following the multiple crises that have unfolded since 2008. By untangling the policy learning processes between multiple crises, past reform attempts and domestic and European “contexts in motion”, the article finds that efficiency-oriented reforms have floundered regardless of the political color of governments or indeed of the nature – political or technocratic – of the governments. Domestic factors, notably the frequency of government alternation, i.e. government instability, and European pressure have further reinforced the orientation towards single-loop lessons, i.e. the almost exclusive effecting of short-term cost-cutting measures.

Austerity and Public Administration Italy Between Modernization and Spending Cuts

This article analyzes the Italian government’s response to the sovereign debt crisis. Given the severity of the fiscal crisis affecting Italy, this article provides insights about the crisis’s implication for public administration in such a politically sensitive environment where drastic and far-reaching measures had to be taken by the government. Drawing on the historical institutionalist approach, the impact of the crisis is not considered in isolation but in the context of the historical trajectory that has shaped the government’s capacity to respond. To assess the crisis’s implications for public administration, the empirical analysis focuses on public employment as an area that is especially exposed to fiscal restraint. The findings reveal that the current crisis has been managed with straight cutback management, as public administration has been considered by policy makers just as a source of public expenditure to be squeezed rather than as a provider of public services in need of modernization so as to sustain economic growth.