A New Authoritarianism?

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist with academic aspirations - who won her spurs writing about the excesses of Stalinism in the borderlands which Timothy Snyder describes in Bloodlands (2014). She is a quintessential member of the “Anywhere” tribe – globetrotting between her American, London and Polish bases – and her latest little book The Twilight of Democracy – the seductive lure of authoritarianism (2019) starts, not untypically, with a party in her converted Polish castle to celebrate the new millennium. But these days many of those present at the event of 20 years ago no longer even speak to her - because they have become hardened nationalist ideologues. Who is it, she wonders, who has changed? Her or them? 

The few who are still speaking to her are clear it is her….but she tells a different tale.

I was prepared to dislike the book but was won over by the chatty tone it adopts to the very serious issue of the rightward drift of Europe and America over the past quarter of century. Julien Benda was a French writer of the early part of the 20^th century who wrote a famous book “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (1927) chastising right-wing intellectuals for their role in bringing France to its knees….(Mark Lilla has a good article here on the book) And Applebaum uses the same device - with caustic vignettes of erstwhile “friends” in all three countries. The basic idea is the one set out by Keynes in his famous quote about 

"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back". 

She might have explored this more systematically and suggested clear criteria to identify the key "scribblers" - falling back instead on those who just happened to be in her own and her husband’s gilded circle. The result is an entertaining, if risky, endeavor….Indeed, I don't think I;ve seen such a public falling out of the elite since Nobel-prizing-winning Elias Canetti's memoir "Party in the Blitz - the English years years" - with the significant difference that he waited a decade before publishing his posthumous diatribe! 

But what a pity Applebaum didn't deliver on the promise of her opening quotation from Fritz Stern's marvellous book on "The Politics of Cultural Despair"... despite her apt quotations from the likes of Roger Scruton – whose “England, an Elegy” (2000) is as good an example of cultural despair as you will ever find….Nor does she even mention Sebastian Haffner whose “Germany – Jekyll and Hyde – an eye-witness account of life in Germany” (and even more his raw posthumous “Defying Hitler”) is a stunning account of how easily ordinary Germans took up the opportunities offered when Jews were suddenly in early 1933 evicted from their flats and jobs

It was, of course, the Dreyfus case which got the French right-wing forces marshalled - and Emile Zola's J'Accuse which disbanded them (at least until 1940). The question these days is where is our Zola? An Australian economist who reckons that a third of us have an authoritarian streak (although no references are given). The "authoritarian personality” was a major focus of academic interest in the immediate post-war period not only with Hannah Arendt (quoted) but, even more, Theodor Adorno - who doesn't however get a mention. I was introduced to political sociology in the early 1960s by a Romanian, Zevedei Barbu  who had produced in 1956 a book which drew on both social psychology and sociology - Democracy and Dictatorship – so I’m sorry that Applebaum fails to pay any attention to this notion of the “authoritarian appeal”. 

Her take on it - such as it is -  is that the world has become so complex that we crave order. Which begs more questions than it answers. But her judgement of her erstwhile “friends” – that they were driven by frustrated ambition – rings rather truer and might have led to a more systematic discussion (linking up, for example, with Haffner's insights)

Chapter four opens with an important discussion of the dramatic change which has taken place in the last two decades in the dissemination of news. For a more systematic discussion about this I suggest people should read “The Power and the Story - the global battle for news and information" (2019) by John Lloyd which looks at how authoritarian states and the market have dealt recently with journalists - starting with chapters on China and Egypt.

One of my tests for a book is to go to the end and look at the bibliography and index. I trust those authors who refuse to follow the dreadful academic tradition of listing every book they know on a subject - and who have the confidence, instead, to select a small number of books they recommend for the reader’s attention. Particularly if they then add a few explanatory notes about each of the books. And this article suggested that I should use the index to check that the chapter headings promised in the book’s Contents are actually followed. Applebaum’s book – unusually for such a writer - has neither a bibliography or index.

Other reviews of the book; https://quillette.com/2020/08/01/twilight-of-democracy-a-review/ - from John Lloyd no less, the Head of the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford

https://artsfuse.org/207714/book-review-twilight-of-democracy-a-slim-investigation-of-the-clerks/

Further Reading; In the past decade, we have been deluged by hundreds of books on the decline of liberal democracy and the various threats it faces – very little of it worth much. 

- The book I recommend as a guide through this confusion is David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2017) which uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different ways in which democracy might end – a coup; catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics; technological takeover; or “improved systems”. One of its nice features is embodying guides to other books in the text itself....

- Four Crises of American Democracy – representation, mastery, discipline, anticipation; Alasdair Roberts (2018) does look to be the best of the more detailed analyses of the deficiencies of the contemporary American system. Roberts produced recently the quite excellent "Strategies for Governing"

- I was not at all taken with ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018) but I’m biased since he worked for Tony Bliar’s Foundation. It has an index but no bibliography. 

- Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the West since the Cold War 1971-2017 by Simon Reid-Hentry (2019) was promising enough for me to buy it but was subsequently the focus of a brilliant and critical master-class review by historian Richard Evans (click title for that).It too has an index but no bibliography. 

Autocratization turns viral (Democracy report 2021 - from V-Dem institute) gives a useful update of how democracy continues to slip globally…

Bookmarks

I’m increasingly swamped by books – both physical and virtual – and just wanted to share some of the interesting titles which are on offer around me….. 

1. Histories of the entire region of east central Europe are not quite as rare you might think – although I have only one in my extensive physical library up in my mountain house. My virtual library can offer Inventing Eastern Europe – the map of civilization in the mind of the enlightenment by Larry Woolf (1994); and Companion to central and eastern Europe since 1989 by Adrian Webb (2008).

But most historians find it easier to focus on individual countries such as Poland.  I have, however, just come across a 1000 page study of the region which looks quite fascinating - entitled From peoples into nations – a history of Eastern Europe; by John Connelly (2020) reviewed here and with an interview here. 

2. Always a sucker for intellectual history, I liked the look of The Ideas Industry – how pessimists, partisans and plutocrats are transforming the marketplace of ideas; Daniel Drezner (2017). I used to dislike the American habit of long self-explanatory titles but now find it a fairly useful guide around the crap which deluges the conscientious reader. 

3. And always wanting to find texts which try to penetrate the souls of nations, I am intrigued with Bending Adversity; Japan and the art of survival by David Pilling (2014) which I found in my local English bookshop last week. Pilling was the lead journalist for the Financial Times for 8 years from 2001 but returned in March 2011 to cover the Tsunami events.   

His take complements superbly the very thorough study published recently by Edinburgh academic Chris Harding “Japan Story – in search of a nation 1850 to the present” (2018) which I am half-way through. It’s an easy read and particularly strong on social and cultural vignettes…. 

4. Donald Sassoon is one of these amazing writers who tries to do justice to an entire subject in one large volume. The history of European Socialism and European culture are two of the issues he has tackled - and his latest is a 700 page tome (with 170 of the pages being bibliography and notes) - “Anxious Triumph – the global history of capitalism 1860-1914” (2019); It’s reviewed here and here

It may be forbidding in size – but it has an engrossing style….It’s lying here on the table awaiting my attention 

5. Rethinking governance – the centrality of the state in modern society by S Bell and A Hindmoor (2009) is another book with a title I find appealing… 

At its simplest, the arguments that governments have been ‘hollowed out’ or ‘decentred’ and must now work with a range of non-state actors in order to achieve their goals…… are overblown. In fact, part of the motivation for writing this book was the lack of a sustained alternative account of governance in which the state played a central role in governance arrangements and relationships, but also steered or metagoverned them. Although we point to instances in which governments have been marginalised and collectively valued policy goals are being pursued by non-state actors, such cases are few and far between. 

In our view governments and the broader set of agencies and public bodies which together constitute the state are and should remain central in governance processes.

But while rejecting what we call ‘society-centred’ arguments about governance, we also express reservations about alternative ‘state-centric’ accounts in which governments are imagined to operate in splendid isolation from the societies they govern, descending from on high occasionally to impose their policy preferences.

Instead, we develop a ‘state-centric relational’ account of governance, arguing that states have enhanced their capacity to govern by strengthening their own institutional and legal capacities but also by developing closer relations with non-state actors 

6. Bill Mitchell is a leftist Australian economist whose Reclaiming the State – a progressive vision of sovereignty in a post neo-liberal world (2017) I’m trying to find the time to at least skim. He’s also one of the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory I’m trying to get my head around. The US Dissent magazine ran a dissenting article here…   

7. Rentier Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? By Brett Christophers (2020) is an epub book which looks another must-read! 

8. Adam Tooze is one of these polymaths whose skills I envy and admire – graduating as an economist, he then got a doctorate in economic history from Berlin University and the LSE and became Professor of modern German history at Yale - focusing on its economic aspects and producing impressive books on first economic aspects of the Nazi regime and then the definitive account of the global financial meltdown (“Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world”). He has blogged about different aspects of the book  https://adamtooze.com/2018/06/23/framing-crashed-1-trade-and-finance-two-different-visions-of-the-twenty-first-century-global-condition/ 

He is a prolific journalist and produces a regular economics newsletter – Chartbook - which is the best briefing on economic issues I know. The latest issue looks at Bitcoin

If everyone has rights, no one has them

This is the paradox which I am increasingly forced to consider. I started well – protesting at school against the massacre and exploitation of African workers in what was then a British colony; and campaigning against poor housing conditions. These were the late 1950s and 60s – when Penguin books were publishing their great series on “What’s Wrong with Britain?” lambasting British institutions as not fit for purpose.

But I then got stuck on what would, these days, be called class issues and was, for example, no great enthusiast for the campaign against “the glass ceiling” - which I saw as an issue for already privileged women…. 

Slowly, however, a hitherto “deferential” society was changing and asserting itself. The traditional authority of bodies such as the church, state, monarch and elites was challenged – not least with the weapons of ridicule and satire. And, oddly, one of the greatest challengers to that traditional respect and authority in the 1980s was no less a figure than the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who launched an astonishing and sustained attack not only on the trade unions but the legal and academic establishments…..Everything needed to change…to be open to scrutiny – with the Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation being enacted in the year 2000

What few of us saw at the time was the effects of this new critical spirit on social cohesion. 

A new little industry has become that of plotting public trust in various profession and institutions. The results are worrying - 

Since the mid-1960s, public trust in government and political institutions has been decreasing in all of the advanced industrialized democracies. Although the pattern and the pace of the decrease are dissimilar across countries, the downward trend is ubiquitous. Except for the Netherlands, which actually shows increased trust in the government from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, all of the other advanced industrialized democracies recorded a decline in the level of trust their respective governments have enjoyed. Austrians pointed to the collapse of collectivist consensus as the main culprit of declining trust in government. Canadians blamed the continuing tensions on nationalism and separatism in the country. Germans attributed their malaise to the strains of unification, while the Japanese condemned the consecutive political scandals and the long economic recession of the 1990s.

Even the Swedes and the Norwegians, generally associated with high degree of trust in politics, became distrustful of their political institutions in the 1990s….

Open and critical inquiry is the mark of a civilized nation…..is it not? Who can possibly gainsay that?

It’s surely only old fuddy-duddies who could argue otherwise? People like David Brooks – whose book “The Road to Character” I looked at not so long ago – just after I had been deeply impressed by another small book called On Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo (2008)

Pages 18-20 of Heclo’s book is a timeline which explains the development of political distrust in the USA   

In the last 60 years our education system has designated institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. 

Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
 But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide. 

How, then, do we protect and promote them? I must confess that, much as I wanted to understand his arguments, I found it difficult to summarise them clearly. He clearly wants to move our focus away from the self and towards a recognition of our debts and obligations to others. To “think institutionally” is to do something much more than provide individuals with incentives to be part of and promote institutions - it rather calls on them to modify their behaviour. Heclo argues that acting institutionally has three components.

-       The first, "profession," involves learning and respecting a body of knowledge and aspiring to a particular level of conduct.

-       The second, "office," is a sense of duty that compels an individual to accomplish considerably more for the institution than a minimal check-list of tasks enumerated within a kind of job description. 

-       Finally, there is "stewardship." Here Heclo is getting at the notion of fiduciary responsibility. The individual essentially takes the decisions of past members on trust, acts in the interests of present and future members, and stands accountable for his actions.

I have some sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect partnership, timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..The quotation, indeed, which graces the first page of my Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960 

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Heclo’s book, I concede, is in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and tended to attract the attention of clerics and university administrators – some of whom produced this interesting symposium 

The trouble, however, is that “possessive individualism” has such a grip on us all that these arguments no longer seem to have any traction. Although I’ve just noticed that another conservative has just published a book which tries to build on Heclo’s much-neglected book - “A Time to Build” Yuval Levin (2020)

Anti-Corruption – a Great Game no longer

Other societies and their cultures are strange – so we invent stories to help us understand their behavior. Thus the French are argumentative and the Germans methodical…Some people indeed have made careers from explaining local behaviour to visitors eg Geert de Hodstede, Richard Lewis and Frans Trompenaars. Add in some scandal and wrongdoing, and you soon have a full-scale industry – namely that of anti-corruption. This post is my attempt as an outsider to offer an overview of that literature of the past 30 years.….

When, in the late 1990s, I first noticed this development, my judgement was that the “best practice” being offered was very much what the sociologists, rather euphemistically, call “an ideal type” ie a version of reality one rarely finds in practice. This is what I wrote at the time – 

A lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice.

Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. But civil service appointments and structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. In those cases a system which is otherwise rule-based and transparent has had minor adjustments made to take account of strong social realities and ensure consensus. 

But in the case of countries such as Northern Ireland (until recently) the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public good had been completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20^th century, made in favour of Protestants.

The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all  

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration – the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform. And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country.

In many countries, local government appointments systems were, until very recently, strongly politicised - and it is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing.

Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold – first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. 

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. And the acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way! 

The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

A later post will pursue this post-modernist disenchantment with the western institutions of which we used to be so proud.

For the moment, it's the situation in the new member states I want to focus on. Ralf Dahrendorf was probably the first to suggest (in 1990) that it would take the newly independent states of central and eastern Europe at least two generations to develop full Rule of Law and a properly functioning civil society. I vividly remember in the mid-1990s the EU’s first Ambassador to Romania (Karen Fogg) giving every visiting consultant such as me a copy of a review of Robert Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work” which contrasted northern and southern Italy and suggested that the latter’s emphasis on family connections put it several centuries behind the north (This little article in the current copy of NLR would suggest that was an overoptimistic interpretation of the North!). This is the same Robert Putnam who coined the concept of “social capital” which was taken up with great enthusiasm for a decade or so by the World Bank and academics but is critically assessed here. Although Robert Putnam gets the credit for making the idea of “social capital” or “trust” a central one in the mid 1990s, it was Francis Fukuyama who, for me, wrote the most interesting book on the subject – namely "Trust and the creation of prosperity” (1995)

Putnam’s book was based on an earlier work by an older American political scientist – Edward Banfield – who had, with his Italian wife, spent two years in the mid 1950s in a small Italian village in the south and subsequently produced a famous book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (1958) which fixed the peculiarities of Italian society in the popular mind – until the Godfather films came along. “The never-ending debate about the moral basis of a backward society” is an excellent 2009 article by Emiliane Ferragina which explored the influence of the books. 

The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists

Further Reading

Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric

Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative work here

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies

Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist

Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

Rule of Law?

If the relevance of research in ….political science is understood as how it may improve human well-being and/or political legitimacy, research has to a large extent been focusing on the least important part of the political system, namely, how ‘access to power’ is organized (i.e. electoral and representative democracy and processes of democratization).

This focus on elections, democratization processes and party systems ignores what we consider to be the more important part of the state machinery for increasing human well-being, namely, how power is exercised or, in other words, the quality of how the state manages to govern society

(Bo Rothstein 2011).

In the autumn of 1990, I made a fateful trip across the North Sea to take up a short-term assignment in Copenhagen with the World Health Organisation to help its Head of Public Health map out strategic options for what were then regarded as “the newly independent states” of central and eastern Europe. The difficulties these countries faced in their “transition” to a “better” state were soon reflected in the literature of “transitology”, “democratization” and of “capacity development”.

One of the many fields into which my new line of work took me was that of “corruption” – which the academics made typically complex by designating it, variously, “particularism”, clientilism or “patrimonialism”. Bo Rothstein is one of the best analysts in the field and explains in the linked article that the very word wasn’t acceptable until the early 1990s – after which it became essentially a stick with which to beat nations judged to be inferior.

The European Union and Commission bear a particular responsibility for first pushing privatization on the countries seeking membership of the Union; and then corrupting their new institutions with tens of billions of European Regional Funding.

This may initially have had the elites licking their lips – but the scale of the bureaucracy required to access the goodies and the subsequent monitoring and fraud investigations has now made this a much less attractive proposition. The use of these funds were recently analysed in painstaking detail in "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2019)

Of course, “it takes two to tango” – and I’m not disputing the need for effective anti-corruption strategies - but there is too much rhetoric and lip-service evident in the way this work is carried out. The sources of the wealth which seduces and corrupts are Western – those who are presented with the opportunities are Bulgarian, Czechs, Greeks, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovaks. 

And the corruption is not just systemic but moral and, thanks to the European Union, has seeped into the very bloodstream of society. The average monthly pension and wage in Bulgaria and Romania is just over 300 euros but their judges, generals and MEPs earn 10,000 euros with a cascading effect on senior salaries.

Is it any wonder that the result is totally alienated societies???

The Fall - and Rise - of Positive Public Admin

The last post flagged up what seems to have been a change in tone recently in the vast literature which has inundated us since the early 90s on public management reform. 

But first a little potted history. A half-century ago, nothing seemed more boring than my chosen field of UK public administration. It was descriptive and drew mainly on public law – with a smattering of politics. But, in the late 1960s, local government and the civil service suddenly became subjects of immense interest. Critiqued for being behind the times and needing “modernisation”, they were investigated by prestigious Royal Commissions which, after several years of open inquiry, issued detailed reports declaring in ringing tones that they were not fit for purpose and needed radical change….

With the world abuzz with talk of people power, I was elected as a municipal councillor, in 1968, in a shipbuilding town and was soon active in community politics – using my new position to help stir local activists against local officialdom. The spirit of such campaigns is nicely captured in Norman Dennis’ People and Planning – the sociology of housing in Sunderland (1970)

 

The Civil Service was a difficult nut to crack and the changes (which started on Ted Heath’s arrival in power in 1970) proved to be a generational process – starting with the introduction of managerial practices from the private sector and, later, more dramatic restructuring.

The reorganisation of local government, when it eventually came in 1975, was quite dramatic - with the number of councils in both England and Scotland being literally decimated.  

 

Thatcherism produced in the 1980s not only privatisation but dramatic changes in the structure of British government which, argued leading academics, was being “hollowed out”. Indeed, by 1992, the talk – on both sides of the Atlantic – was of the very reinvention of government.

This was the stage when a new academic industry of reform got underway - it was Chris Hood who first gave the new wave its designation (in 1991) of New Public Management but it was a book called Reinventing Government (1992) by a town manager and consultant (Ted Gaebler and David Osbourne) which opened the academic floodgates and led to Vice-President Gore’s Commission on Reinvention….A table in the Hood article caught the mood perfectly -

New Public Management (NPM)

No.	Doctrine	Meaning	Typical Justification
1	Hands-on professional management of Public Organisations	Visible management at the top; free to manage	Accountability requires clear assignment of responsibility
2.	Explicit standards and measures of performance	Goals and targets defined and measured as indicators of success	Accountability means clearly stated aims
3.	Greater emphasis on output controls	Resource allocation and rewards linked to performance	Need to stress results rather than procedures
4.	Shift to disaggregation of units	Unbundle public sector into units organised by products with devolved budgets	Make units manageable; split provision and production; use contracts
5.	Greater competition	Move to term contracts and tendering procedures	Rivalry as the key to lower costs and better standards
6	Stress on private sector styles of management practice	Move away from military- style ethic to more flexible hiring, pay rules, etc	Need to apply "proven" private sector management tools
7.	Stress on greater discipline and parsimony	Cut direct costs; raise labour discipline	Need to check resource demands; do more with less

 

For the next two decades, books and articles rolled from the academic world in increasing numbers about the new fad of “competitive managerialism” – although often with a note of caution…

 The Fourth Revolution – the global race to reinvent the state by J Micklewait and A Wooldridge (2014) - which I took to task a couple of years ago - seems, ironically, to have been the high-point of that wave……

Since then, the tone has changed – thanks largely, it seems, to Mark Moore the emphasis has turned to examples of what successful public managers and institutions are achieving. The Successful Public Governance website based in Utrecht is an excellent example….

 

I’ve listed below (in chronological order) the other books which have come to my attention recently and which also reflect the new tone

Understanding policy success – rethinking public policy; Alan McConnell (2010)

Agents of Change – strategy and tactics for social innovation ; S Cels, Jorrit de Jong and F Nauta   (2012)

Recognising Public Value Mark Moore (2013)

Dealing with Dysfunction – problem solving in the public sector; Jarrit de Jong (2014)

How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy ; Michael Barber (2015). A clearly written book about the approach taken by Tony Blair’s favourite consultant

The Barber Report (HMSO 2017) which he then summarised for a new government

Dismembered – the ideological attack on the state; Polly Toynbee and D Walker (2017) a strong analysis of austerity by two british journalists

“The 21^{HYPERLINK "http://zegervanderwal.com/zeger/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/The-21st-Century-Public-Manager-Chapter-1.pdf"st}HYPERLINK "http://zegervanderwal.com/zeger/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/The-21st-Century-Public-Manager-Chapter-1.pdf" century public manager – challenges, people and strategies”; Z van der Wal (2017) An interesting-looking book written by a Dutch academic and consultant who has spent the past  7 years as a Prof at the University of Singapore

Reclaiming Public Services – how cities and citizens are turning back privatisation; TNI (2017)

Radical HelpHYPERLINK "https://ukaji.org/2019/01/30/book-review-radical-help-how-we-can-remake-the-relationships-between-us-and-revolutionise-the-welfare-state-by-hilary-cottam-2018/" – how we can remake the relationships between us and Revolutionise the Welfare State; Hilary Cottam (2018) an inspiring example of experimental work

Great Policy Successes 2019

Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand (anu.edu.au); ed J Luentjens, M Mintrom and P n’Hart (2019)

Public Value Management, governance and reform in Britain ; ed J Connolly (2021) Pity about the extensive academic references and exclusive focus on UK – no references to Netherlands eg de Jong

Guardians of Public Value – how public organization become and remain institutions (2021) ed A Boi, L Harty and P t’Hart