This Marie-Curie research project was about the diffusion of administrative reforms, focusing on innovations in legislative and/or regulatory process. Governments everywhere are engaged in self-conscious projects of administrative and managerial improvement and an international discourse on administrative change and reform is emerging.
The literature on administrative reform and New Public Management (NPM) has generally overlooked the determinants of the spread of innovations among developed and developing countries. There are only sparse literature focuses on administrative law innovations and little empirical evidence on the global spread of administrative reforms. Moreover, the vast majority of diffusion studies in political science tend to focus on adoption and ignore the stages prior and after the point at which the decision is made. Classic diffusion theory developed the concept of "innovation process", for both individuals and organisations, along which adopting an innovation is represented by a punctuated time decision, anticipated and preceded by several stages. Indeed, one cannot consider a policy innovation in isolation, but needs to understand how previous (complimentary and contingent) innovations affect the adoption and implementation. In addition, prerequisites and necessary conditions can have a relevant effect on the innovation process.
This project provided general insights into the ways OECD and EU countries have balanced accountability and legitimacy on the one hand and efficiency on the other. With its comparative approach to administrative innovations and reinventions, this project aimed to formulate recommendations for effective and efficient policy innovations. As a result the following research questions were formulated: How can one comprehend developments in public administration and regulatory governance and gain useful insights from them? Is there any common pattern of diffusion of administrative reform of rulemaking process? Are we facing a global paradigm shift? If so, who are the catalysts and promoters of such new NPM paradigm in regulatory governance? Or alternatively, have ‘modern’, ‘scientific’ and ‘smart’ administrative states been reacting to global changes in markets, fiscal capacity, technology, politics, and public attitudes? Such innovative research questions contributed to the academic discussion of administrative lawyers and public management scholars, as well as political scientists interested in international relation, and global governance. The quantitative and qualitative findings were also useful to test several models of administrative change identified by scholars in the previous decade.
Turning to methodology, particular attention was paid to the selection of the sample of countries (within the OECD and EU) in order to avoid statistical problems stemming from the lack of observations. Systematic literature review was conducted for identifying theoretical explanations. Finally, mixed research was explored: Qualitative analysis for reconstructing the major events and change actors in the diffusion process; quantitative analysis (EHA) for testing internal and external determinants of diffusion.
The project was carried out at the the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Fabrizio Gilardi. The Institute of Political Science offered me the best environment for developing methodological skills necessary for this comparative, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research project.
De Francesco, F. (2012) “Diffusion of Regulatory Impact Analysis in OECD and EU member states”, Comparative Political Studies, 45:10, 1277-1305.
De Francesco, F, C.M. Radaelli, and V.E. Troeger (2012) “Implementing Regulatory Innovations in Europe: The Case of Impact Assessment”, Journal of European Public Policy, 19:4, 491-511.
De Francesco, F. (2016) “Diffusion across OECD Member States”, in Claire Dunlop and Claudio M. Radaelli (eds) International Handbook of Regulatory Impact Assessment, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 271–85.
De Francesco, F. (2011) “Different Patterns of Institutionali- sation: A Comparative Analysis of Regulatory Impact Anal- ysis and Standard Cost Model”, In L. Mader and M. Tavares de Almeida (eds.), Quality of Legislation—Principles and In- struments. Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Interna- tional Association of Legislation (IAL), Lisbon, June 24-25, 2010, Baden-Baden: NOMOS Publishers.
De Francesco, F. (2008) “Bounded rationality and policy diffusion: Social sector reform in Latin America”, by Kurt Weyland, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 26:5, 1037–8.