The Fate of Administrative Tradition in Anglophone Countries during the Reform Era

Abstract

The ‘old Commonwealth’ — or the ‘Westminster democracies’ (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) — have formed a natural group of industrialized democracies with institutional roots in the British tradition. This chapter addresses the Anglophone administrative tradition identified with these countries and explores the impact of two decades of recent reform.1 This reform has been generally more radical than reform in other countries during the same period. One question to be addressed is whether change of this level and type is sufficient to challenge the nature of a tradition or whether an administrative tradition can accommodate such change. At the height of the reform era, when NPM was dominant and accepted as the future of public administration, market mechanisms were seen to be supplanting bureaucracy, the political executive was being strengthened, and open, flexible government was replacing the relatively closed, traditional systems. These developments looked to pose challenges for administrative traditions. Observers foresaw a turning point, with propositions such as ‘The End of Whitehall: death of a paradigm?’ (Campbell and Wilson 1995; Chapman 1996). Yet debates in the subsequent decade have centered on post-NPM models, and there is also evidence of the resurrection of discarded pre-NPM features — perhaps the reassertion of tradition (Christensen and Laegreid 2006; Halligan 2007c).