Abstract
We argue that the neoliberal tradition and new public management reforms of the public sector effectively erode the core (liberal) democratic values of the rule of law and transparency. The tension between public law and managerially-influenced governmental policy is in practice resolved by the emergence of what we call “shadow management” in public administration, whereby managerial decisions that clash with constitutional and administrative law are dealt with in internal memos or consultancy reports and hidden from public view. The consequence is a duality in the public sector, which potentially reduces public trust in institutions and undermines their democratic legitimacy. Finally, we argue that when governmental neoliberal policy clashes with legal requirements, the likely effect is that the popular institution of the (governmental or parliamentary) ombudsman, originally introduced for legal supervision over civil servants, takes on the new deceptive role of providing pseudo-legal justification for neoliberal reform, making neoliberalism and ombudsmen a particularly problematic combination from a democratic and legal perspective. We support our contentions by a case study of Swedish higher education and hypothesize that the mechanisms we highlight are general in nature.
Highlights
Neoliberalism has provided the ideological framework behind the transformation of the Western liberal state since the 1980s
The wide range of reforms initiated since the 1980s to re-shape the public sector in this new image has been conveniently subsumed under the label ‘new public management’, or NPM, [1,2,3,4]
We do so by first outlining key characteristics of neoliberalism and new public management, in the sense, we conceive of it, and move on to empirically illustrate how reforms in Sweden systematically challenge the transparency of the public sector and the rule of law in a core liberal state, essentially through the emergence of an illiberal practice in the form of what we call ‘shadow management’
Summary
Neoliberalism has provided the ideological framework behind the transformation of the Western liberal state since the 1980s. We aim to pursue such a course, arguing that the neoliberal tradition and new public management reforms of the public sector effectively erode core (liberal) democratic traditions and undermine good governance, in the sense of transparency and the rule of law. We do so by first outlining key characteristics of neoliberalism and new public management, in the sense, we conceive of it, and move on to empirically illustrate how reforms in Sweden systematically challenge the transparency of the public sector and the rule of law in a core liberal state, essentially through the emergence of an illiberal practice in the form of what we call ‘shadow management’. For the positioning of our research in relation to other work on and criticism of the institution of ombudsmen, we refer to Section 7 below
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