Abstract
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.
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.
Introduction 1
The politicization of the administration is an institutionalized feature of executive government in countries belonging to the Napoleonic administrative tradition, where ministerial cabinets are entrenched governance structures that often leave the higher civil service not only marginalized in rendering policy advice but also frustrated in the execution of policy programmes (Kickert, 2011). However, most of the countries in the Napoleonic tradition have undergone significant processes of administrative change over recent decades that intended to offer senior civil servants the opportunity to gain a more active professional role (Ongaro, 2009). Yet, little is known about the changing role of ministerial cabinets in the context of public management reforms, particularly in Southern Europe.
This article aims to fill this gap by providing an analysis of the Italian case from the early 1990s, when the exceptional collapse of the post-war party system because of corruption scandals paved the way for the introduction of subsequent waves of public management reforms. Following the survey conducted by Bellucci (1995), the changing functionality of the ministerial cabinets in the context of the Italian politico-administrative transition has remained unexplored. Our research reveals that the horizontal networking between staff has complemented the vertical control of departments exerted by ministerial cabinets up to the early 1990s. 2 Given the lack of governing capacity of the new and under-institutionalized parties, the established personal networks between advisers have become a key resource for executive coordination in the Italian system.
The article proceeds as follows. First, we outline our approach for the study of how institutional legacies influence the implementation of administrative reform policies. Then, we describe the background of this study, namely the intense political and administrative dynamism of the Italian case over the last two decades. We next turn to the empirical analysis by examining the transformations of ministerial cabinets in the context of the reform of politico-administrative relationships which occurred during the 1990s and the 2000s. We also investigate how the structure and role of ministerial cabinets have affected the implementation of regulatory impact assessment and performance management as policies intersected with policy advice reform. We conclude with a discussion of the main findings and formulate some elements for a future research agenda.
Research design
Conceptions of policy advice vary according to focus and scope (Boston, 1994; Halligan, 1995). We can make sense of the subject by distinguishing two comparative perspectives on the role of policy advice in modern government. The first perspective focuses on the knowledge dimension of policy change (Radaelli, 1995) and it addresses some basic questions such as the nature of the information which is made available to government and the types of institutions and procedures which have been developed to cope with systematic usable knowledge as an essential ingredient of the policy process (Peters and Barker, 1993). In this case the political influence of ‘networks of expertise’ has been debated by the comparative public policy literature on think-thanks and other policy fora (Gaffney, 1991; Radaelli, 1998). The second perspective draws attention to policy advice as one aspect of the wider interest in the dimensions and consequences of public service politicization. Challenges to the traditional pre-eminence of the conventional expertise mobilized by the senior civil service have been detected over the last decade or so (Page and Wright, 2007). The main challenge appears to come from the ‘political subordination’ of the senior civil service to the politically responsive personal staff by which ministers seek to exert control over policy development within the executive (Page and Wright, 1999). The increase in the number and importance of political advisers represents the ‘structural’ manifestation of the increasing politicization of the senior civil service pointed out by Peters and Pierre (2004) in the context of NPM-style administrative reforms.
For the purposes of this article, we refer to the second perspective on policy advice as we are interested in ministers’ offices as a key aspect of the efforts to arrange the political control of the senior civil service. In doing so, our aim is to contribute to research in comparative public administration which has shown a renewed interest in the relation between political advisers and non-partisan career civil servants in contemporary democracies. On the one hand, the advent of the political staff has challenged the monopoly on advice traditionally enjoyed by a neutral civil service in a number of Westminster-styled jurisdictions (Eichbaum and Shaw, 2010). Australia has gone even further than many other systems of the Westminster family in developing an extensive advisory structure which now constitues a distinct partisan arena within its core executive (Maley, 2011). On the other hand, public management reforms, far from restricting the influence of the political staff, have left unaltered or further strengthened politicization in countries such as France and Belgium where ministerial cabinets have long played a central role in the production of policy advice. In France the border that once existed between political staff and division heads has to a great extent vanished since politicized senior civil servants are now actively involved in ministerial cabinets (Rouban, 2007). Unlike France, in Belgium the reduction in the influence of ministerial cabinets had a firm place in the agenda of the ‘Copernicus’ reform plans launched in 2000. However, the way the new policy cells reinvented the old ministerial cabinets demonstrated how changes in policy advice production remain path dependent (Brans et al., 2007).
In comparative perspective the Italian case is noteworthy in a number of respects. First, in Italy, as in France and Belgium, ministerial cabinets have long been institutionalized advisory structures. Second, as in Belgium, ministerial cabinets came under fire in the 1990s when sweeping administrative reform plans aimed to drastically redesign their size and functions as is shown in the sections that follow. Third, Italy is the only country in which subsequent waves of administrative reforms occurred in the context of a radical and endless transformation of the political system prompted by the displacement of much of the political class in the early 1990s as demonstrated in the next section.
The reform of the Italian ministerial cabinets is therefore an intriguing case for studying how institutional legacies influence processes of administrative change, using conceptual innovations and methodological perspectives developed within historical institutionalism. The field of comparative public administration has long been characterized by a relative neglect of the analytical tools that have been developed by historical institutionalists in other fields of comparative politics. However, research on public management reform has taken a disciplinary turn. Since the late 1990s, analytical issues are increasingly framed in terms of historically oriented research styles (Barzelay and Gallego, 2006; Painter and Peters, 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004).
This study’s research design is congruent with the defining principles of the institutionalist approach, which aims to explain how the interaction between actors and the institutional context reproduces historical institutional legacies and/or shapes administrative change (Barzelay and Gallego, 2006; Bezes and Lodge, 2007). Within this approach, the target is to specify the causal mechanisms that link institutional legacies and the outcomes of administrative reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2009). In the effort to identify the mechanisms of ‘legacification’ (Meyer-Sahling, 2009), the article builds on the logic of historical explanation that understands administrative reform policies by reconstructing the temporal context in which they occur (Pollitt, 2008). This logic stresses the need to account for the different aspects of temporality which constitute and differentiate reform processes as sequences of mechanisms that link institutional arrangements and actor choices (Grzymala-Busse, 2011).
We also build on those attempts that have been made to nuance the historical institutionalist dichotomy between self-reinforcing institutional stability and abrupt radical change (Pollitt, 2008; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2009). First, institutional patterns can undergo different modes of gradual but nevertheless transformative change as advanced by Streeck and Thelen (2005) and identified by Kickert (2011) in the analysis of administrative reforms in Southern Europe. Second, path dependent analyses do not necessarily imply tracking self-reinforcing sequences since reform outcomes can also be linked to institutional arrangements by reactive sequences that transform or even reverse early events (Mahoney, 2000; Pollitt, 2008). The third element is the temporal intersection between separate reform sequences that can have a major impact on subsequent events (Mahoney, 2000).
As mentioned earlier, the case of Italy since the 1990s merits particular attention since the reform of ministerial cabinets occurred in a context characterized by subsequent waves of public sector reforms inspired by New Public Management principles and tools. Accordingly, our approach does not examine the reform of ministerial cabinets as a single occurrence of reform; rather, the reform of politico-administrative relationships is considered here as a chain of intersected reform initiatives.
The intersection between the reform of ministerial cabinets and public management reforms makes Italy an interesting case for exploring the research question, ‘How has the reform of ministerial cabinets affected the implementation of public management reforms?’ In reflecting on this question, we test two hypotheses. The first is that the reform of ministerial cabinets contributed to bringing public management principles and skills into the Italian public sector. The second is rooted in our historical institutionalist approach and it argues that the historical trajectory of the Italian case hindered the effective implementation of public management reforms. In searching for an historical institutionalist explanation, the reform of ministerial cabinets has to be interpreted taking into account not only the institutional legacy but also the contemporaneous events, or what Barzelay and Fuechtner (2003) call the ‘context in motion’ of administrative reforms. In particular, we assume that the temporal proximity between the ongoing transformation of a fragmented party system and the reform of ministerial cabinets has led the new political elites to privilege patronage as a political control device inherited from the old regime rather than modern managerial skills and tools (Meyer-Sahling, 2009).
To test our hypotheses, we assess the impact of ministerial cabinets’ transformations on two main components of the broader reform of politico-administrative relationships: the introduction of performance management, which was meant to enhance the measurement of outputs and outcomes in order to put pressure on public managers who do not perform to the agreed targets (Hood and Lodge, 2006); and the introduction of regulatory impact assessment as a device within the rule-making process which imposes procedural constraints to limit bureaucratic drift (Radaelli, 2010).
The Italian context
Until the early 1990s Italian ministerial bureaucracies displayed all the main traits of the South European model (weakness of the administrative elite, legalism coupled with informal governance structures arranged by strong party organizations, institutional fragmentation and insufficient mechanisms for policy coordination), except for the extensive politicization of higher civil servants (Sotiropoulos, 2004). The features of politico-administrative relationships can be traced back to the pact of reciprocal self-restraint that was formed between political and administrative elites: senior civil servants renounced an autonomous and pro-active role in the policy-making process, while politicians refrained from interfering with the internal seniority system. This exchange consolidated the sclerotic tendencies of the Italian higher civil service which was best described as an ‘ossified world’: elderly and with a low level of professionalism, without horizontal and vertical mobility, dominated by the legalistic outlook of personnel coming almost exclusively from the underdeveloped South (Cassese, 1999).
Top members of staff: career background (1948–94) (percentages)
Source: D’Auria (1981) and Sepe (1996).
As highlighted by D’Auria (1981) and Sepe (1996), only those administrations endowed with more compact and autonomous administrative corps such as the prefects in the Minister of the Interior, the armed forces in the Ministry of Defence, or the ambassadors in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs preserved the privilege of producing the heads of their ministerial cabinets.
In the first phase of the Italian Republic the ministerial advisers’ role was confined to providing ministers with advice about the legal and technical aspects of the policies that resulted from consultation and bargaining among senior party leaders who dominated the decision-making process (Agosta and Piccardi, 1988). The turning point occurred during a massive loss of popular support for a party system that had been characterized for over 40 years by proportional electoral rules, high party fragmentation and no full alternation in government. The collapse of the old governing parties, which had been unwilling to modify a dysfunctional administrative machine, opened a unique window of opportunity for a permanent cycle of administrative reforms that replaced the inertia of previous decades (Capano, 2003). Administrative modernization took place within a politico-administrative regime that has been aptly defined as a ‘context in motion’ (Ongaro, 2009) characterized by the endless transformation of the party system, which operates as a fragmented bipolarism, a floating system in which heterogeneous and fragmented coalitions of unstable parties alternate in government (Cotta and Verzichelli, 2007).
Civil service reform programmes promoted during the 1990s have supported the establishment of autonomous administrative elites. Any prerogative of the ministers to override acts of higher civil servants has been definitely removed by Legislative Decree 80/1998, which also widened the areas of responsibility delegated to public managers. However, new tools for steering have been interposed between the political and the managerial spheres. In particular, the privatization of public employment has increased ministerial discretion in appointing senior executives, as it has made it possible to hire public managers on fixed-term contracts, who thus have lost security of tenure (Legislative Decree 80/1998). Under the new model, ministers have remained responsible for making appointments, but they are supported by specialized advisory bodies which are entrusted with the task of assessing public managers’ performance. Furthermore, much attention has been devoted to limiting bureaucratic discretion over rule-making by instituting regulatory impact assessment.
The implementation of administrative reforms was expected to imply the managerial reinvention of ministerial staff units. Consequently, the Legislative Decree 300/1999 has regulated the role and activities of ministerial cabinets as ‘offices of direct collaboration’ which assist the ministers in the exercise of their new functions of setting targets, evaluating results and regulating rule-making. The reform presupposed the downsizing of political staff and also a radical change in the professional qualification of top members of staff. Legally trained advisers were expected to be displaced by personnel with the technical and management skills required for the tasks of performance management and regulatory impact assessment that have been given to specific units in the ministerial staff (the internal control office and the legislative office, respectively). Modernization of political advice was also supposed to counteract the traditional fragmentation of the Italian executive governance as it was based on a whole-of-government approach. To this end, both the systems of performance management and impact assessment have been arranged as a network of ministerial offices led by an oversight body located within the Prime Minister’s Office.
However, the following sections reveal that administrative reform outcomes were far from those promised by reform promoters. The empirical analysis in the next section relies on a variety of data. 3 We examined extensive documentary data sources, in the form of both legislation and official reports from Italian public institutions. In particular, Government Almanacs published by the Italian Chamber of Deputies since 1996 have been used to generate an original database on top political advisers’ career paths which updates and deepens the analysis of Italian governments until 1994 conducted by D’Auria (1981) and Sepe (1996). Finally, between September 2009 and March 2011, we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with experts knowledgeable on politico-administrative relationships in Italy.4
The failed modernization of ministerial cabinets
The reform of ministerial cabinets enhanced the flexibility of the advisory units. It left their organizational design in the hands of ministers in order to shape them by secondary regulations in accordance with their personal policy-making styles (Legislative Decree 300/1999). However, the analysis of the organizational make-up of political staff units reveals a high level of structural isomorphism across ministries. In addition to the legislative office and the internal control office established as policy cells by primary legislation, a standardized set of units has been established by ministerial regulations. First, the Head of the Cabinet Office continues to be the most relevant unit of all ministerial staff. It performs a whole range of coordinative tasks in managing not only the advisory structure but also the departmental organization. Second, all ministerial cabinets include: a personal secretariat, responsible for the minister’s constituency work and political agenda; a technical secretariat, consisting of a network of external policy consultants responsible for policy formulation; and a press office, consisting of communication professionals responsible for handling media relations. Finally, most of ministerial cabinets include also an administrative secretariat entrusted with executive tasks.
Italian ministerial cabinets: size and composition (2011)
Source: Authors’ calculation from ministerial decrees regulating ministerial cabinets. Note: Junior ministers’ staff units are not included.
Top members of staff: career background (1996–2011) (percentages)
Source: Authors’ calculations based on data gathered from Government Almanacs published by the Italian Chamber of Deputies.
The role of the professional corps members in political advice activities is even larger than shown in Table 2, since top members of staff generally surround themselves with swarms of external experts coming almost exclusively from the corps ranks. Furthermore, the predominance of members of the corps within the political staff emerges clearly if we examine the professional background of ‘cabinetists’, that is the core of top members of staff who accumulate longer service displaying political and/or competence mobility. Data reveal that 30 out of 114 top members of staff held positions in different policy domains and/or served different ministers. This group of professional cabinetists were appointed to 103 out of 216 positions that were distributed in the period 1996–2011 and is composed entirely of members coming from the corps; administrative courts (43.3 percent), the Court of Auditors (20 percent), the state general attorney (23.3 percent), the judiciary (6.7 percent), and parliamentary councillors (6.7 percent), respectively. Cabinetists not only typically switch between policy sectors during their political advisorship (80 percent of them are policy shifters), which seriously questions their specialist expertise with a particular policy field, but they display a low level of political loyalty as well, since 60 percent of them are coalition shifters. The level of personal loyalty is even lower, since just 10 percent of them stay with one minister.
The failed modernization of ministerial cabinets is a result of their persistent functionality as vehicles for political control that coordinate ministerial policies and systematically follow up files that are dealt with by the administrative services (Cassese and Mattarella, 2007). Yet, the introduction of temporary appointments in 1998 was supposed to reduce the incentives to enhance ministerial cabinets as decision-making centres because it was meant to establish a relationship of trust between ministers and top-level executive management, eventually bypassing the filter of the political staff. Some of the provisions introduced under the second Berlusconi government (Law 145/2002) further widened the scope of political appointments to other levels, and the proportion of senior positions that could be attributed to people hired from outside the administration was also increased.
However, the limited impact of government changes on turnover in the senior ranks of the ministerial bureaucracy reveals that the ability of the ministerial class to rely on the politicization of top officials has been constrained by the lack of supply of suitable personnel alternatives that guarantee a mix of key features such as political loyalty and governmental expertise. 5 As far as political loyalty is concerned, the under-institutionalization of party organizations, the frequent alternation and the early termination of most governments made it difficult to structure partisan networks that reach into ministerial bureaucracy. In addition, because of the sectoral compartmentalization of career structures, senior executives are not able to draw on extensive inter-institutional networks, which is an indispensable prerequisite for performing their role successfully. 6 Finally, the legalism of the administrative system entangles senior executives in a web of procedural constraints, making them reluctant to exercise managerial discretion and inhibiting the recruitment of outsiders lacking training in law. 7
Nevertheless, senior civil servants adhere to what the ministerial class desire for fear of being sanctioned if they do not commit to policy inputs sent from the ministers who enforce sanctions through the renewal of temporary positions. Two factors have made temporary appointments an effective instrument of political control. First, ministers can rely on ministerial cabinets as well-staffed personal advisory units that perform active and direct ‘police patrol oversight’ (McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984) of senior executives’ activities. Second, the precariousness of job positions has been heightened by subsequent provisions (Law 145/2002 and Decree-Law 138/2011) which abolished the minimum length of the appointment of public managers.
Police patrol oversight conducted by ministerial cabinets has therefore combined with job uncertainty to temper the autonomy that administrative reforms gave to Italian senior executives. Ministers rely on the expertise and professionalism of the members of the professional corps, especially given the persistent marginal status of the senior civil service and the centrality of administrative law in the activity of public bodies. However, cabinetists have also stepped in to fill the void left by the collapse of the old party networks in the early 1990s, significantly enlarging their role as nodes of communication and coordination within the Italian governance system.
In fact, the timing of civil service reform influenced sequence outcomes since it determined the interaction of the institutional legacy with party system restructuring as a quickly unfolding process which was temporally close to the reform developments. The complexity of executive coordination has grown since the rapid and endless transformation of the party system left no time for the new party organizations to develop dense networks linking public institutions. As a result of the rapid tempo of party system change, political actors relied on cabinetists as the only elite institutionally capable of executive coordination.
Thus, the collapse of old party linkages and the rapid process of party system restructuring increased the significance of advisers’ networking. It is around cabinetists that policy networks are now constructed since they can support executive coordination thanks to their personal networks based on the common training in law and the socialization through their activities within professional corps and public institutions. The critical role played by ministerial advisers in coordinating the executive process is further highlighted by the appointment of people who have served in ministerial cabinets to top positions in the large majority of autonomous bodies which make up Italy’s distributed public governance. The result of these career patterns is a web of personal ties linking advisers who accumulate experience of public administration and develop ‘political craft’ (Goetz, 1997) commuting between the professional corps, the ministerial bureaucracy, and the wider public sector. Cabinetists form, develop, and entrench informal personal contacts throughout their service in various public bodies and then use these wide-ranging relationships to informally exchange information, consult and bargain policy issues across ministerial boundaries when they act on behalf of their ministers. These informal links are better described as loose and ever-shifting alliances of advisers cutting across professional corps membership that compete for influence within the fragmented Italian executive.
The weaknesses of both Italian party organizations and the senior civil service, thus, has made the role of ministerial advisers critical in coordinating the governmental activity through horizontal networking. However, the factionalized nature of cabinetists’ personal networks, coupled with the fragmentation of the new ministerial elite, countered the emergence of a whole-of-government approach as is shown in the following sections.
Regulatory impact assessment
The need to revise the Italian rule-making process emerged at the end of the 1990s when international pressures combined with the reform strategies devised by the public administration minister Bassanini. This approach pursued efficiency gains through the delegation of discretionary powers to public managers and relied on regulatory impact assessment (RIA hereafter) as a political control tool.
RIA was made compulsory for regulatory measures drafted by ministries even though it did not require an immediate complete enforcement, but was established experimentally before consolidation (Law 50/1999). The reform of the Prime Minister’s Office and line ministries mandated that each legislative office formulating draft legislation guarantee the evaluation of the regulative costs (Legislative Decree 300/1999). The reform also established the primacy of the Prime Minister’s Office on RIA since it entrusted the Department of Juridical and Legal Affairs (DAGL) with the task of coordinating the impact analyses produced by line ministries. However, RIA was performed in only five cases in the period between 1999 and 2001, and it did not bring about any transformation in the regulatory process.
The following period was marked by abandonment of the attempt to revise the rule-making procedure. The re-launch of impact analysis occurred a few years later, when in 2005 RIA was introduced permanently (Law 246/2005), but the enforcement of this provision was postponed until the adoption of a Governmental Decree, which was approved only in 2008. After that, the rule-making procedures were apparently embedded in a pervasive network of rules. The DAGL had the power to prevent normative proposals from reaching the Council of Ministers if they lacked a RIA genuinely respectful of the rules on rule-making.
Thus, administrative discretion was apparently constrained, as shown by the report periodically produced by the DAGL, since (on paper) RIA was adopted for the large majority of cases. 8 The DAGL has also repeatedly used its power to ask for the integration of the RIA initially delivered (73 percent of the total cases in 2010) (DAGL, 2011: 31). However, it is a sign of the impotence of this control system that, despite these efforts, it appears unable to turn the formal RIA produced by the ministerial offices into a genuine one. In fact, RIA has remained broadly speaking a bureaucratic formality (Senato della Repubblica, 2010: 10). First, RIA was expressly excluded from the budget law and law decrees, which represent the major (and most significant) part of the Italian norms adopted in the last few years (Di Mascio et al., 2013). Second, the majority of the impact analyses entirely lacked any form of consultation, while the evaluations were not performed on alternative options. Third, most RIAS were deficient in the individuation of the specific category of stakeholders interested in the provision (DAGL, 2011: 37). Fourth, the recourse to any form of quantitative evaluation remained episodic. All in all, the effort of consolidating RIA was meant just to appear in line with the ever-more pressing indications coming from the European level and international organizations.
The implementation of the RIA intersected with the ongoing expansion and entrenchment of ministerial advisers’ networks, suffering from incompatibilities with the competing logic of particularistic political control. Both the executive politicians and their advisers were indifferent to the implementation of the RIA as a tool that typically cannot yield control on the content of individual rules. The interest of policy-makers lay in maintaining the maximum extension of discretionary power within the rule-making process, thus hollowing out any procedural constraint. Within a fragmented regulatory process marked by informal contacts between public administration and civil society, politicians preferred to keep all the regulatory cards in their hands and play them differently case by case. As is also signalled by the paucity of open consultations, the relationship between public administration and civil society still revolves around informal and selective exchanges arranged by the personal networks linking cabinetists and their ministers.
Performance management
The reform policy began in 1993, when the technical Minister of Public Administration in the Ciampi government, Mr Cassese, tackled the issue of performance assessment as a key element of his comprehensive reform package. A performance management system was introduced that mandated the constitution of a specialized advisory body (Servizi di controllo interno - SCI) within each ministerial cabinet.
The SCIs were composed to a great extent of ministerial advisers, most of them coming from the Court of Auditors, who supported the quest for administrative change. However, the process of diffusion of these structures was particularly slow and contrasting: in 1997, four years after the reform, they were constituted in only 17 ministries out of 20 (Corte dei Conti, 1997). Furthermore, ministers did not produce the directives, targets and indicators that should have oriented the performance evaluation of public managers, while they displayed a keen reluctance to cease meddling with administrative management.
The second phase was defined by the Bassanini reform which, following the recommendations of international organizations such as the OECD, tried to re-launch the performance management system and established within the Cabinet Office a special unit to steer it (the Technical and Scientific Committee for Performance Management and Strategic Control [CTS], Legislative Decree 1999/286). Indeed, the SCIs were eventually set up in all the ministries and the annual ministerial directives were actually adopted (Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 2004). However, the CTS was incapable of pushing slow administrations and leading the innovation process. Performance targets were heterogeneous, fragmented and set without the direct participation of the ministers who continued to show little interest in translating their policy goals into measurable targets. As a result, they lacked indicators for the assessment of efficiency and effectiveness, and the monitoring was largely based on the self-declarations of public managers rather than on objective data. Performance management has been reduced to a sheer formality in a closed and secretive civil service system where temporary political appointments were not constrained by any encumbrance in terms of due process or transparency requirements. Therefore, ministers had no incentives for strengthening the audit capabilities of government and they privileged the police and patrol oversight of ministerial cabinets as a more effective political control tool. It is not surprising that ministerial advisers were discouraged from following the path of administrative modernization. In fact, they were not particularly interested in colonizing the SCIs which became a sort of elephant’s graveyard for ‘unpleasant’ managers.
Finally, the third phase was marked by the reform devised by public administration minister Brunetta (Legislative Decree 150/2009). As a reaction to the distortions of the implementation of the Bassanini reform, a new oversight body was created (Commissione indipendente per la Valutazione, la Trasparenza e l'Integrità delle amministrazioni pubbliche [CIVIT]) emphasizing its technical and neutral nature as a remedy to the weakness of the CTS. Moreover, the SCIs were replaced by the Organismi Indipendenti per la Valutazione (OIVs) which were to be headed by performance management experts who were supposed to be independent of the influence of political parties or trade unions. Procedural mechanisms were also put in place in order to ensure that political appointments were based on performance evaluation and followed a transparent and competitive process. Finally, with regard to performance related pay – formally provided since 1983, but never properly applied – some evaluation criteria were rigidly predefined by the law.
However, the Brunetta reform has not succeeded in disrupting a resilient institutional feature such as the political involvement in administrative management which continues to be sustained by the enduring fragmentation of the party system. As a result the composition of the OIVs has not differed from that of their predecessors (the SCIs) since they remain mainly in the hands of public managers without any injection of alternative skills from non-ministerial settings. The analysis of the ministerial performance plans shows a clear inclination to merely comply with the norms without sufficient effort to achieve the necessary level of qualitative sophistication (CIVIT, 2011a). Furthermore, the actions of the CIVIT have been slowed down by the political class’s lack of commitment to implement administrative reforms as is demonstrated by the absence of adequate resources (CIVIT, 2011b). Finally, the fiscal crisis constituted the final event that reinforced already existing patterns of governing. In fact, ministerial elites exploited the crisis to promulgate the Decree-Laws 78/2010 and 138/2011 that have frozen the implementation of the new reform and restored ministerial discretion by removing the procedural links between performance evaluation and the public appointment process.
Discussion and conclusions
This article examined what happened to politico-administrative relationships in Italy after the party system collapse of the early 1990s. It sought to assess whether the reform of ministerial cabinets has sustained the implementation of public management reforms or whether it has reproduced patterns of patronage as an institutionalized feature of the Italian administrative tradition.
The findings reveal that the ministerial cabinets have been reformed in support of the traditional forms of patronage-oriented political control of public bureaucracies. Specifically, the empirical analysis provides evidence corroborating the historical institutionalist hypothesis as it draws attention to the interaction between historical institutional arrangements and party system restructuring as the key determinant of the reform outcomes. In fact, the rapidity of access to government for the new political elites, their frequent alternation in power, and the general instability of the party system encouraged them to resort to personal networks inherited from the old regime as the readily accessible mechanism to establish their authority over policy-making in the short term. Rather than developing new sources and modes of political advice, the governmental leadership of weakly institutionalized parties privileged the use of extant connections between cabinetists as the most effective strategy to withstand the volatile environment of a politico-administrative context in motion. Thus, evidence from the Italian case confirms that temporality matters in reproducing institutional legacies, since the rapid tempo of change has left no time to effectively implement new institutional arrangements of political control built from scratch in accordance with international standards (Grzymala-Busse, 2011).
The failed modernization of ministerial cabinets and the expansion of their role in the machinery of government constituted a reversal in the trajectory of the reform of politico-administrative relationships. In fact, negative feedback with modern political control tools advocated by the reform community gathered around entrepreneurial public administration ministers produced a counter-reaction that precluded the expanded use of such tools. As a result of this reactive sequence linking reform events demarcated on the basis of contrasting solutions for political control, administrative change has occurred through ‘layering’ and ‘conversion’ (Streeck and Thelen, 2005). As shown by the empirical analysis, modern tools such as RIA and performance management could only be added by the enlightened innovators instead of dismantling the entrenched legalistic system. On the contrary, the pre-existing network between professional corps members has been redirected to a new horizontal coordinative function further expanding their role in the Italian cabinet system. This conversion collided with the performance management and regulatory impact assessment at an early point in their trajectories to produce enduring consequences as they remained at the stage of mere formal adoption. 8
Our study of the intersection between different reform sequences sheds light on the administrative reform process as a whole, which is constituted by a number of separate initiatives held together by a dense exchange of mutual influences. In doing so, it reveals the potential for researchers of an integrated approach that does not consider administrative modernization initiatives in isolation as sorts of monads but instead explores the general trajectory of administrative reform as internally articulated into different but interacting policies.
Finally, our research puts forth implications for the emerging literature on ministerial staff as a structural solution for political control. As in other Napoleonic countries the influence of ministerial cabinets in Italy has not diminished. As intimated earlier, in France the political staff expanded because of the growing politicization of senior civil servants, while in Belgium reform attempts have been frustrated by the path dependence that sustained the reproduction of ministerial cabinets as instruments in the hands of Belgian parties. The networks explored in this study are a product of Italy’s distinctive advisory structure, where top members of staff are appointed from the professional corps much more than in France and Belgium. In particular, the empirical analysis reveals the importance of the horizontal relationships that top members of staff have with each other in executive coordination which complements the vertical dimension in which ministerial advisers are usually seen. This is due to the restless reshaping of the new Italian party organizations which appear ill-equipped to exert collective control over the executive machinery.
The horizontal networking between ministerial staff has only recently been recognized in the literature on the Westminster system such as in Australia where it supports traditional forms of coordination (Maley, 2011). The horizontal networking of top members of staff in Italy should instead be considered as expanding its role in the functioning of a centrifugal cabinet system in which the governing parties do not provide coordination. The evolution of horizontal links between ministerial staff thus undoubtedly deserves further comparative research in that it raises a research theme that rarely features in the literature on executive coordination.