Abstract
Public administration and public governance play a crucial role in society today by ensuring that social needs are met. Due to the constantly changing environment, public governance models have transformed many times, creating differences in public governance practices among public administration institutions, with combinations of contradictory structures and principles that coexist. Accordingly, this paper aims to provide an overview of different public governance models, extract quantifiable elements based on models’ principles and examine the extent of layering of different governance models at different levels of public administration in the specific case of the Slovenian administration. Thus, the main focus is on identifying the differences in characteristics of public governance practices between state administration and local self-government. The results show state administration institutions are more strongly characterised by the Neo-Weberian model’s principles. In contrast, local self-government institutions are more oriented to managerial public governance and Digital-Era Governance practices. Public managers may regard the results as additional resources for democratic and efficient governing. At the same time, they may provide policymakers with in-depth insights to consider while determining the trajectories of future public administration reforms.
Highlights
Public administration and public governance need to keep pace with the constantly dynamic socio-economic environment and look for ways to improve their productivity and process efficiency while increasing collaboration (Hammerschmid et al 2019; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Sørensen and Torfing 2021), since they play a crucial role in today’s society by taking care of social needs
The results showed that various parts of the regional public administration had a different prevalence of each public governance model: experience of top management still matters in Weberian model background, tendencies were found in the environment of policymakers and top management expectations, and public governance elements in documents, acts, and regional laws
Our results show the characteristics of at least five different public governance models characteristics are present in Slovenian public administration, where the basis of the state administration institutions are the practices of the Neo-Weberian model
Summary
Public administration and public governance need to keep pace with the constantly dynamic socio-economic environment and look for ways to improve their productivity and process efficiency while increasing collaboration (Hammerschmid et al 2019; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Sørensen and Torfing 2021), since they play a crucial role in today’s society by taking care of social needs. Economic, and political changes bringing significant challenges have led to public administration and public governance models being profoundly transformed many times to adapt to the changing environment. This indicates that current public administration institutions encounter conflicting ideas, structures, demands, and cultural elements (Iacovino et al 2017). As administrative reforms are multi-dimensional with “mixed” orders, they create differences in public governance practices among public administration institutions, with combinations of contradictory structures and principles that coexist (Olsen 2007), as specific trends of earlier models remain when new model ideas arrive (Dunleavy et al 2006; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Changes resulted from different approaches, ranging from legislative amendments to parliamentary strategies and individual organisations’ actions (Kovacand Virant 2011; Kovacand Jukic 2016)
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