Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 19th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Main Conference Theme Author(s) Walter Bartl Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg Halle (Saale) Germany Title Counting with demography: The natural economy of public service management File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Fertility decline as an unintended consequence of transformation has affected most eastern European countries which in this respect can be seen as forerunners of developments to be expected throughout the OECD. Public sector organizations (PSO) are affected by these changes through changes in demand for public services but also through changes considering the supply side. Focusing on the demand side of municipal services declining population numbers could cause problems of remaining costs and deteriorating services in the long run if no adequate response is developed. In the absence of real markets its economically inspired critics see state bureaucracy as lacking adequate tools for an efficient and sustainable management of public services in this situation. But is this necessarily the case? Drawing on statistics and 65 structured interviews with decision makers in 21 municipalities (East Germany, West Germany, Poland) the paper investigates if there are distinctive institutional features of the public sector that contribute to the demographic responsiveness of PSO. Empirically the focus is on local education services and general administration. New Public Management (NPM) attempts to provide a remedy for problems of low responsiveness of public administrations partly by suggesting copying private sector practices to PSO. Thus some have criticized the NPM movement for economizing public administration and politics such that the distinctive features of public sector service provision are neglected. The critic is certainly right where it emphasizes the distinctiveness of public and private sector organizations. But it misperceives the active role of PSO in adapting reform ideas and strategically transforming their institutional heritage (Pollitt/Bouckaert 2004: 99-100). Furthermore it ignores Webers insight that PSO are economically active organizations (wirtschaftende Verbände) oriented primarily to political order but nevertheless also towards economic ends partly based on in-kind calculation. Results show that there are specific institutional mechanisms of economic rationalization in the public sector that come to bear in situations of a shrinking demand. For example public finance law connects population numbers more or less closely to municipal revenues which generates pressure for reductive responses under shrinkage. Furthermore political attempts to restructure municipal territorial constituencies introduce population thresholds indicating minimal sizes for autonomous municipalities such that real waves of municipal mergers can be catalyzed. Related to personnel policy the calculation in-kind practice becomes most evident: When a certain number of public employees per 1.000 inhabitants is considered to be legitimate for municipalities and comes under public scrutiny through benchmarking practices no monetized economy is involved at all. Nevertheless municipal decision makers take demographic and political conditions into account when deciding upon infrastructure in shrinking municipalities, as a variety of responses (reductive, stabilizing, expansive) in the respective institutional settings of the study show. The Weberian concept of economically active organizations is able to sensitize for the original responsive capacity of calculative practices rooted in a natural economy. NPM reform efforts seem to strengthen calculation in-kind and thus to be contributing paradoxically to a more flexible neo-Weberian State rather than to an economization of the public sector in the sense of a convergence with the private sector.
