NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC EDUCATION: A CATALYST FOR THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH SCHOOL PRINCIPALS

New Public Management (NPM) is one of the most significant reforms in public welfare in recent times. Making individual civil servants more dependent on the directions of the local manager than on common professional standards, previous sociological research argues that NPM results in a ‘deprofessionalization’ of civil servants. Taking a somewhat different approach, recent public administration research indicates that NPM may, at the same time, enhance the professional status of welfare managers. By integrating the literature on the sociology of professions and public administration, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of NPM using the example of a professional project for school principals in Sweden. Taking a process‐oriented methodological approach, the result shows that Swedish school principals gained increased support for their professional project by the introduction of NPM. The article argues that NPM can function as a catalyst for welfare managers' professional projects.     

EC Credit Assistance Programs in the Light of the US Experience: Budgetary, Financial and Political Aspects

The bulk of the subsidy cost of European Communities (EC) credit programs is not represented in the EC budget. The cost of EC loans and guarantees are not shown, and only token entries are included for the possible activation of guarantees connected to borrowing and lending. Only in the case of credit programs which entail an interest-rate subsidy, does the budget show an amount corresponding to the subsidy cost. EC budgeting and accounting methods, like those in most member states, hide the full cost of the EC credit programs. The lack of subsidy disclosure has political implications in terms of budget decision-making and control; budget authorities have neither adequate information to compare the trade-offs among the various credit assistance programs and other expenditure programs, nor to evaluate or measure the efficiency and effectiveness of credit operations. Moreover, the citizens of Europe, who are taxpayers both in their states and, to a lesser extent, in the Community, do not have a clear understanding of the costs and benefits of credit programs, either at the state or the EC level. The article refers to the US experience of federal credit reform, especially with regard to the disclosure of the cost of credit programs, as a good example of budget transparency and investigates to what extent this experience could be applied to the European Communities.     

MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF TECHNOLOGY‐DRIVEN CHANGE WITHIN AN INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: THE GREEK CASE

Propelled by the driving forces of globalization and technology explosion, public institutions face the challenge of rapid and discontinuous change. Such change has come to undermine the relevance of traditional approaches on how an institution should be managed. We analyse a technology‐driven change effort, the implementation of an Integrated Information System (IIS), that unfolds within the boundaries of the institutional context of the Hellenic Parliament. The purpose of our research, which reports on a qualitative field study, is to explore and understand how the particularities of technology‐driven change on the one hand, and institutional change on the other, can be integrated, paying particular attention to how the different actors involved in the process interact and affect the unfolding of such a change effort. Our findings show that strong friction did indeed occur between old and new institutional factors, but that the key factor enabling the change effort to advance and finally gain legitimation was the encouragement and support in the institutional change process of opportunity‐based and emerging changes, as proposed by the technological change literature.     

Le Marongiu «mineur»

SUMMARY

In this article Professor Corciulo reviews the minor writings, articles and essays, of the distinguished Italian constitutional historian Atonio Marongiu, who was an active member of the Commission and died in 1989. The main body of his work was concerned with the history of representative institutions from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution and its aftermath, but also included Sardinia, which was a special interest of his and a range of other European countries. He wrote as well on the history of the family and on the methodological problems of writing the comparative history of parliamentary institutions.     

Party patronage in contemporary democracies: Results from an expert survey in 22 countries from five regions

This Research Note presents a new dataset of party patronage in 22 countries from five regions. The data was collected using the same methodology to compare patterns of patronage within countries, across countries and across world regions that are usually studied separately. The Note addresses three research questions that are at the centre of debates on party patronage, which is understood as the power of political parties to make appointments to the public and semi‐public sector: the scope of patronage, the underlying motivations and the criteria on the basis of which appointees are selected. The exploration of the dataset shows that party patronage is, to a different degree, widespread across all regions. The data further shows differences between policy areas, types of institutions such as government ministries, agencies and state‐owned enterprises, and higher, middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy. It is demonstrated that the political control of policy making and implementation is the most common motivation for making political appointments. However, in countries with a large scope of patronage, appointments serve the purpose of both political control and rewarding supporters in exchange for votes and services. Finally, the data shows that parties prefer to select appointees who are characterised by political and personal loyalty as well as professional competence.     

Les Cortes et le Parlement au Portugal. 750e anniversaire des Cortes de Leiria de 1254: Congrès International, 26–28 novembre 2004—Leiria

SUMMARY

The Scottish Parliament, established in 1999, was to be a novel type of parliament and to herald a ‘new politics’. While it was inevitable that the Scottish parliamentary model would inherit some of the features of the Westminster system, one of the major parliamentary models in the world, Home Rulers insisted on the Scottish Parliament's need to adopt novel procedures and principles right from the start to keep it from becoming a ‘Westminister’. An analysis of Scottish Home Rule discourse in documents from the late 1980s and the 1990s shows that at the time, Westminster was constructed as an ‘anti-model’. This article establishes in what respects Westminster was an anti-model for the architects of the Scottish Parliament and describes the ideal parliamentary model which they defined. It then considers whether the Scottish model as it exists today conforms to their expectations. The case presented here is that the Scottish parliamentary system is indeed different from the British system in several fundamental respects, such as the fact that it is more committee-based and less executive-oriented, but that it is closer to the Westminster model than has been acknowledged, and that in some respects, the Scottish Parliament has moved towards that model by adopting typically British modes of functioning. Some characteristics of the Westminster system which it has integrated are the Presiding Officer's power to have a casting vote or, more controversially, the way the executive is held to account, through adversarial Question Times. The Scottish Parliament is thus neither a mini-Westminster nor an anti-Westminster: the Scottish parliamentary model is a hybrid of the West European and the Westminster models.     

New-Style Councils, New-Style Councillors: From Local Government to Local Governance

The aim of this article is to contrast an empirical study on the changes in the attitudes and behaviors of local politicians with recent literature on local governance. To undertake this task, the article brings together the results of about two hundred in-depth interviews with local councillors from nine Catalan local councils over two different periods of time: 1986–1987 and 1998–1999. Through comparison with the results of the interviews carried out in the '80s and '90s, the work confirms a tendency toward change, which with a few slight adjustments, can be made to fit with those academic contributions that claim the appearance of certain strategic, pluralist, and relational styles of government.     

THE DRIVE FOR TRANSPARENCY: ORGANIZATIONAL FIELD TRANSFORMATIONS IN SWEDISH HEALTHCARE

This paper provides an account of the rising clamour for transparency in the Swedish healthcare field. Previous research into accounting, auditing and classification has shown that such visualizing technologies potentially have the capacity to create new objects and ideals in a field ( Miller 1994; Power 1997; Bowker and Star 1999 ). It is thus reasonable to believe that the simultaneous use of various visualizing technologies in a field might transform it. This paper provides an analysis of the early stages of such a transformation process. The carriers that promote transparency are identified and it is shown that the drive for transparency has opened up the field to new actors. It is also shown that the drive for transparency has changed the quality discourse and as a consequence of that, the National Quality Registries are beginning to be opened up to the public.