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Introduction


TED1 was focused on the theme of the ‘neo-Weberian State’ (NWS) and participants were asked each to send in a limited number of short ‘propositions’ about NWS before the meeting. These propositions were intended to be statements of what participants thought of the NWS model – did it make sense ? Was it a reasonably accurate portrayal of what had happened in countries they studied ? What were its theoretical and normative implications ? My job – as reflected in this introductory paper – was to make a reflective overview of these propositions, and to connect them to some of the more substantive papers that were presented in Tallinn.

     In the event, the propositions circulated by TED participants went far beyond anything that Geert Bouckaert and I had anticipated when we originally coined the label ‘NWS’ for a section of our 2004 book on public management reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). Our original focus was on the empirics – on what we thought we saw was going on. NWS was a descriptive concept. Interestingly, only a minority of the propositions and comments we received focused on the empirics. Far more popular was the theoretical side: where different ‘proposers’ linked or compared NWS to a wide range of other theories, including multi-level governance, network theory, regulatory theory, deliberative democracy, Luhmanesque systems theory, Public Service Motivation and the Napoleonic model – to mention but a few ! ‘Paradigm’ was probably the most frequently occurring word in the comments we received, and yet in our book we never in fact called the NWS a paradigm, and, indeed, I don’t think it is one. It is just what we called it: a ‘model’ of public management reform.

     One initial and sobering thought is that perhaps this distribution of propositions reflects the state of the academic field of public administration and public policy in continental Europe ? Could it be that we are an academic community whose theoretical work runs far ahead of our empirical work ? [That may be why virtually nobody made any comment at all about research methods and what might be needed to test the accuracy and extent of the NWS description, or to assess its consequences ?] We love inventing new theories and models and terms but we are rather slow to design and conduct the large-scale empirical research that might help us to test some of these abstract constructions ? Our typical comparative text is still a collection of country chapters written by individual country experts, within only a loose overall theoretical or conceptual framework. If so, perhaps one thing that might come out of TED would be a more ambitious empirical agenda, with genuinely strategic and comparative projects, run from several centres as disciplined teams ?

     However, let me return to the propositions. They were very various and, in the space available, I cannot comment on them all. Since NWS was originally intended as a descriptive concept, I will say only a little at the end about its connections with other theories, although that is potentially a very productive discussion. Here, however, I will mainly deal with those propositions that cast doubt on the accuracy of NWS as a description or characterization of what has been going on. Among comments of this type there seem to be four main substantive points:

1. Each country has its own variations – Norway, for example, is different from, say, the Netherlands or Denmark, and Finland has several contradictory tendencies within its reform trajectory – and therefore the NWS concept misses a lot of important local detail;

2. The Weberian model does not apply to the Napoleonic states, which have a separate model. Therefore France, Spain etc. cannot be ‘post-Weberian’;

3. In eastern Europe it remains true even now that the most important influence is not the Weberian model but the Russian/Soviet model. Again, therefore, NWS does not really make sense in those territories;

4. NWS ignores the influence of the EU, and needs to be adapted so as to take account of the reality of multi-level governance.

I will try to address each of these in turn.