Institutions and political change

A focus on the institutions may appear to express an excessive concern with the persistence of patterns of governing. The path dependence that has been central to the study of public policy from an institutionalist perspective can also apply to the institutions themselves, so that many vestigial institutions may remain in contemporary governments.

The state is not as entrenched and inflexible as critics might like to have us believe. One of the standard justifications for the view of governance that stresses networks and other less formal means of action is that the state is bureaucratic, ossified, and non-responsive. Certainly governments at times do appear to correspond to those unflattering descriptions, but the political system has demonstrated that it can also be responsive and reformist. That is true both for the reform of policies being delivered by the state, and for the state itself (Bouckaert and Pollitt, 2004). Three particular forms of adaptation on the part of the state should be noted here, as reflecting their capacity to cope with changing circumstances.

One of the most important patterns of change in contemporary states has been their capacity to cope with blended, or dual, sovereignty, and to find means of continuing to act as state entities even in the face of merger into larger state-like unions - the European Union as the obvious example - or complex transnational regimes such as that managed by the World Trade Organization, or perhaps even more significantly the International Criminal Court. While state institutions persist, they share control over important sections of their policy regimens with other actors, but most have been able to do so with minimum difficulty. Thus, even in areas that have been ‘defining functions’ of states (Rose 1974) adaptation has been possible, and state-driven (if no longer exclusive) governance persists.

A second important change in the governance patterns of contemporary states has been in the selection of instruments used to achiever their policy purposes. At one level, rather than relying on command and control instru­ments as in the past governments are now utilizing ‘softer’ instruments to achieve their policy goals. For example, social programmes increasingly are implemented through co-operative arrangements with partners in the not-for-profit sector that reduce the costs for government but perhaps more importantly reduce the perceived intrusiveness of the programmes. One of the best examples of the use of ‘soft law’ of this type is in the European Union, with its use of the ‘open method of co-ordination’ (Radealli 2003) as a means of achieving European social and employment goals. At a second level, governments have shifted from direct provision of some types of benefits to regulators of private provision, so that again the same services may be delivered but in a less intrusive, and less costly, manner.

Finally, states have changed structurally, and have decentralized and deconcentrated significantly. Part of the administrative logic of the new public management has been to empower managers of autonomous and quasi- autonomous public organizations to make more of their own decisions about policy and management, and to reduce hierarchical control over these managers and their organizations.

These three types of change are all important, and they have altered some aspects of governance, but they by no means amount to an incapacity of the contemporary state to govern, and to govern effectively. Indeed, to the extent that one of the changes may have been having that effect the state has acted to reassert its influence, and reversed the reform, at least in part. Therefore, the sense of a state structure that is not sufficiently nimble to match environmental change does not appear supported by the evidence. If we were to examine policy changes at even more of a micro-level, e.g. specific types of taxation, we can also find that states have responded to meet the challenges posed by economic change, and have been able to maintain their streams of revenue despite those challenges.