Abstract
Political science and public policy scholars have long emphasised the importance of understanding institutional change and policy entrepreneurship. This review article is a response to this call in the context of reform in macroeconomic bureaucracies. Adopting a ‘systematic’ approach to reviewing the literature, this paper investigates when, why and how institutional reform in key monetary and fiscal macroeconomic bureaucracies (i.e. central banks, treasuries, and ministries of finance) takes place. It reviews 29 selected articles on reforms in these bureaucracies published in Thomson & Reuters Web of Knowledge’s Social Science Citation Index, JSTOR, Sage and Wiley databases from 1980 to 2015. It shows that the current state of knowledge about institutional change in key macroeconomic bureaucracies is characterised by a lack of sufficient bridge-building among variants of institutional approaches as well as between institutional theory and public policy theory, resulting in persistent knowledge gaps. Against this background, the present review contributes to the body of knowledge on this topic in two main areas. First, it reviews the literature systematically to provide an overview of the key theoretical and empirical characteristics of when, how and why institutional reform takes place in these bureaucracies. Second, it identifies gaps and future avenues of research to stimulate progress in this important area of study.
Highlights
There has been a global move over the last two decades towards macroeconomic policies informed by neoliberalism (Simmons, Dobbin, & Garrett, 2008)
Political science and public policy scholars have long emphasised the importance of understanding institutional change and policy entrepreneurship
It shows that the current state of knowledge about institutional change in key macroeconomic bureaucracies is characterised by a lack of sufficient bridge-building among variants of institutional approaches as well as between institutional theory and public policy theory, resulting in persistent knowledge gaps
Summary
Our key contributions to the literature are to provide the first comprehensive review of institutional change and policy entrepreneurship in macroeconomic bureaucracies, consolidate existing research in political science and public administration, establish connections between fragmented literatures, identify gaps between different research streams and suggest promising paths for future research on institutional change. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review to analyse how the scholarship on reform in macroeconomic bureaucracies has built-up over the last three decades. We discuss limitations of the current literature and their implications for further research
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