‘Public Service’, ‘Public Management’ and the ‘Modernization’ of French Public Administration

Since the mid‐1980s, successive French governments have attempted to ‘modernize’ the structures and methods of public administration. Although this vocabulary of ‘modernization’ is distinctly French, many of the actual reforms appear, at first sight, to be based on imported ‘new public management’ doctrines. In this article, we analyse the recent French reforms and the ideas underpinning them and we attempt to locate these reforms in their comparative context, employing data from a wide range of official reports and secondary sources and from a series of semi‐structured interviews with senior officials. We build on the analyses of Hood (1991 and 1995) and Wright (1994) that if many governments are dealing with similar problems by adopting similar approaches to reforms based on private sector man‐agement methods, the actual nature of the reforms in any individual state depends on the national context, or ‘initial endowment’. In France, the importance of administrative law, the successful experience of nationalized, monopoly, public‐service providers in the post‐war period, the political weight and established rights of civil servants, and the idea of the ‘general interest’, represented at the local level by the prefect, explain many of the distinctive features of the hybrid modernization reforms. In short, an analysis of the policy of modernization and its origin leads to conclusions which are highly consistent with new institutional explanations of policy making (Hall 1987)