Philippe Bezes

Path-Dependent and Path-Breaking Changes in the French Administrative System: The Weight of Legacy Explanations

The French bureaucracy has often been viewed as one of the most in need of reforms among Western countries but also as one of the most ‘frozen’ or ‘immovable’. Michel Crozier’s theory of France as a ‘stalled society’ with a ‘stalled state’ (Crozier 1964, 1970) has provided a widely accepted framework. In many comparative studies, France has been portrayed as a special case (Page 1995), a laggard (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004; de Montricher 1996; Rouban 1995) and only weakly influenced by NPM ideas (Rouban 2006). If it is really the case that administrative reforms have been more limited in France, a first research question should be to understand why the French administrative system is more resistant to change. But a further formulation could consider the possibility that the French system has changed differently, following a specific trajectory due to the constraints and the impacts of its institutional arrangements. Other than convulsive ruptures, institutional changes can take various forms (Bezes 2007a; Bezes and Lodge 2007; Hall 1993; Streeck and Thelen 2005): low-profile, ideational, incremental, gradual, each of them potentially transformative.

Trajectories of Administrative Reform: Institutions, Timing and Choices in France and Spain

The influence of national administrative institutions on contemporary reforms has often been noted but insufficiently tested. This article enriches the comparative perspective of administrative reform policies by focusing on four interrelated dimensions: the choices of reformers, institutional constraints, timing and sequencing and long-term trajectories. This article tries to determine whether most similar administrative systems exhibit analogous contemporary reform trajectories in content, timing and sequence. By comparing the administrative reform policies of two ‘most similar’ Napoleonic countries, France and Spain, this article analyses the commonalities and divergences of decentralisation, territorial state reorganisation, civil service reforms and policies that focus on performance management and organisational design. The article identifies the ‘causal mechanisms’ that characterise the specific role of institutions and considers both the role of context and the importance of policy intersections.

The Development and Current Features of the French Civil Service System

In this chapter, four issues are examined. The first section is devoted to the historical development of the French civil service. The second section focuses on the various dimensions of the internal labour market while the third one addresses the issue of politicization. The fourth section analyses the recent transformations at stake and the way they potentially challenge the existing features of the French civil service system. The conclusion draws some perspectives of evolution due to these changes.

Historical Legacies and Dynamics of Institutional Change in Civil Service Systems

We are said to live in an age of reform. The past three decades have witnessed the privatization of state-owned enterprises (Feigenbaum et al., 1999), the retrenchment of the welfare state (Pierson, 1994), change in the wider political economy (Hall and Soskice, 2001) as well the reorganization of the ‘administrative state’ itself. Although emerging in largely separate literatures, these studies have produced rather similar findings and conceptual perspectives. One similarity is that far from diagnosing universal paradigm changes and ‘convergence’, scholars have explained that reforms across states and time have varied. Another similarity has been the widespread use of broadly historical institutional perspectives to account for the observed variations. A particularly popular concept has been ‘path dependency’ to highlight how the force of past commitments — in the form of high fixed costs and increasing returns — not only directs common external demands for change into particular national and sectoral reform trajectories, but also exposes states to a specific set of ‘vulnerabilities’ rather than others (see Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000).

Public Administration Reforms in Europe

Based on a survey of more than 6700 top civil servants in 17 European countries, this book explores the impacts of New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms in Europe from a uniquely comparative perspective. It examines and analyses empirical findings regarding the dynamics, major trends and tools of administrative reforms, with special focus on the diversity of top executives’ perceptions about the effects of those reforms.

French Top Civil Servants Within Changing Configurations: From Monopolization to Contested Places and Roles?

The top civil service under the French Fifth Republic is usually considered to be a distinctive, closed and powerful social group within the state. Many scholars underscore that the early Fifth Republic has accentuated the historical French pattern of a centralized political system with elitist institutions and an administrative system which offers both a high degree of autonomy to its administrative system and great opportunities for its top civil servants to occupy key administrative and political positions. Since the early 1980s, important shifts in the political, institutional, social and economic context have considerably modified the environment in which senior officials operate and on which their power and influence depends. National policies such as decentralization, nationalization and privatization and other changes, such as those resulting from EU membership and changes in parties in power have transformed the roles, work and conditions of top civil servants. Many have argued that the higher civil service remains unchanged and unreformed. However, this view may be misleading. The aim of this chapter is to examine the dynamics of change in the top civil service and to identify more changes, not necessarily radical breaks with the past, than are usually recognized. As a large and heterogeneous group, the higher civil service reveals and reflects some of the transformative dynamics which affect the French state.

Civil Service Reforms, Public Service Bargains and Dynamics of Institutional Change

Following three decades of managerialist change and privatization, the aftermath of the financial crisis has launched another age of civil service reform. Initial responses to the age of austerity have been pay freezes and cuts, a further push towards outsourcing of public services, as well as, in some countries, extensive redundancies. Furthermore, decades of civil service reform across OECD and non-OECD countries have not led to a sense of stability: across countries, politicians are bemoaning the lack of a responsive civil service and a civil service that is ‘fit for purpose.’ Such calls for responsiveness contrast with those who argue that a ‘Weberian,’ ‘merit-based’ bureaucracy is at the heart of ‘good governance’ (see Dahlstrom, Lapuente and Teorell, 2012). The politics of austerity, climate change and aging populations will provide for further tension between the competing preferences for political responsiveness, on the one hand, and supposedly detached expertise, on the other (Lodge, 2013).

The French politics of retrenchment (2007–2012): Institutions and blame avoidance strategies

While the semi-presidential French regime and the reinforcement of ‘presidentialization’ under Nicolas Sarkozy have often been associated with the idea of disruptive and heroic changes, France’s post-crisis budgetary policy appeared strongly embedded in the previous commitments made by President Sarkozy and relied largely on measures of a gradual and low-profile nature without significant U-turns. In order to explain this result, the article emphasizes the effects of French institutions on government capabilities and on the potential allocation of blame and the related political strategies connected with the electoral cycle and timing. In addition, it also explores the specific characteristics of the French national crisis and its perceptions by top bureaucrats, as well as the nature of the external macro-constraints that influenced French budgetary policy, whether originating with markets, international organizations or the European Union. Points for practitioners This article emphasizes the importance of institutions and political strategies in cutback management. The main argument is that budget reduction policies are embedded in political and electoral constraints that strongly affect their design and choices. The article provides many empirical elements about the specific characteristics of the French national crisis and how French governments reacted to the 2008 crisis. It puts emphasis on the specificities of French political institutions and the strong exposure to blame. The French political strategies of blame avoidance are described between 2008 and 2012, as well as the nature of the external macro-constraints that influenced French budgetary policy, whether originating with markets, international organizations or the European Union.

The Macro-Politics of Managerialism: Revisiting Weberian Perspectives

The ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) has dominated the literature on administrative reform for over two decades. Christopher Hood’s ‘A Public Management for All Seasons?’ article in Public Administration in 1991 is widely seen as the locus classicus of the NPM-word. Hood’s description of the key doctrines characterizing NPM has been widely adopted and cited. Less attention has been paid to a further aspect of Hood’s original argument, namely the conditions under which particular doctrines rise and fall in their popularity. One particular explanation, according to Hood, was to see the rise of NPM-related doctrines as a ‘response to a set of special conditions developing in the long peace in the developed countries since World War II’, namely changes in income level and distribution weakening the coalitions for government growth; changes in the socio-technical system combined with the development of ‘post-Fordist’ technologies affecting the organization of work; a shift towards ‘new machine politics’ with new form of campaigning through intensive opinion polling; a turn towards ‘a more white-collar, socially heterogeneous population less tolerant of “statist” and uniform approach in public policy’ (Hood 1991: 7).

Introduction: public administration reforms in Europe

Despite the salience of public administration reforms in Europe, there is surprisingly little systematic research identifying how and whether public sector reforms have been implemented, and with what outcomes. This introductory chapter introduces the topic of public administration reform, as well as the general approach and purpose of the book. With an aim of evaluating public administration reforms in different European countries, three reform paradigms are distinguished. The first has the implementation of Weberian-style structures and processes at its core; the second is the introduction of the New Public Management, and the third brings together elements of Weberianism with aspects of NPM. A secondary objective is to study convergence and divergence in European public administration reform through a comparison across a large set of European countries.