Guillermo M. Cejudo

Explaining change in the Mexican public sector: the limits of New Public Management

The Mexican public sector has undergone significant transformations in recent decades. This article argues against the view that these changes are the result of New Public Management-style reforms. Even though the Mexican government has applied some of the tools associated with this paradigm, the essential NPM doctrines — granting more autonomy to public agencies and government officials, and using market mechanisms to promote competition in the public sector — have been absent from the agenda. The Mexican experience exposes two erroneous assumptions in the international debate about NPM: that there is a global trend of similar national reforms and that every change in the public sector is part of this new paradigm. Instead, the changes in the Mexican public sector are the result of incremental adjustments to two broader domestic processes: economic liberalization and political democratization — which have led to a smaller and relatively more accountable administration. Points for practitioners This article suggests that not all reforms are the result of New Public Management initiatives. It points towards alternative explanations for change in the Mexican public sector and identifies political democratization and economic liberalization as the main sources of change. This view challenges existing accounts of public sector change in developing countries and suggests a more complex process of reform. The main lesson for practitioners is that, when analysing reform experiences, they should look at the underlying causal processes rather than at the official rhetoric. Moreover, the article reminds practitioners that NPM is only one among several sources of doctrines for changing the public administration.

Critical Junctures or Slow-Moving Processes? The Effects of Political and Economic Transformations on the Mexican Public Sector

This paper argues against prevailing explanations of public management change in Mexico that rely on analysis of “momentous” decisions and short term explanations of reform. In contrast, there is an explicit attempt to explain changes in the public sector by long-term developments in the political economy. Specifically, I will show how different processes of change have taken place in the Mexican public sector as a gradual adaptation to the processes of economic liberalization and democratization, punctuatted by specific reform efforts. The main hypothesis is that changes in the size and economic scope of the public sector are explained by changes in the government’s economic strategy, whereas the changes in structure and public management policy choices are better explained by the process of political democratization. The overall objetive of this research is to improve our understanding of the dynamics of institutional change in government structures, by emphasizing the distinction between deliberate reform and incremental change, and by linking both processes to broader developments in the political and economic spheres.

A Conceptual Framework and Methodological Guide for Research on Public Management Policy Change in the Latin America Region

This article presents a conceptual framework and methodological guide for researching the process of public management policy change in the Latin America region. It provides an explicit the methodological approach for case study research on this topic.The focus on the Latin America region is due to the sponsorship of the Inter-American Development Bank, which desired an explicit methodological guide for conducting research on public sector management reform. While the article is specifically geared to this purpose, it also exhibits a distinctive general approach to a large class of case study research designs. This class includes instrumental case study research about processes, incorporating variants that are rich in narrative, explicit in their explanatory framework, and comparative. Publishing the article in IMPR is appropriate since a) this class of case study research has not benefited from specialized methodological exposition and b) much public management research fits within this class. Accordingly, the article is addressed to both public management researchers interested in the specific research topic and those engaged in instrumental case-oriented research on processes, more generally.