Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
In the international discourse concerning recent administrative reform developments there is a dominant overall interpretation propagated by a dominant story‐teller: the public management programme (PUMA) of the OECD. This article takes issue with this story, arguing that instead of a singular pattern of adaptation there have been and there are several different reform trajectories in Western‐style democracies, largely predicated on historically determined patterns of state‐society relations and significant variations in political cultures. A detailed comparative analysis of the case of Sweden is here used to illustrate the prevalence of a pattern of ‘structured pluralism’ and the fruitfulness of a historical‐institutionalist approach to the comparative study of administrative reform.
Rune Premfors (Thu,) studied this question.