Do Politicians Matter in Public Sector Management Reform? : Or, What Room to Maneuver Do Public Manageres Have?

This paper aims at mapping public managers' substantial influence on administrative reforms as a consequence of politicians' missing demand for influence. Since any major public sector management reform is closely linked with changes in the corresponding regulation, we essentially focus on legislative-executive relations and, in particular, on the influence parliamentarians exert on the respective bill. The introduction of a 'New Accounting Model' at the national level of the Swiss federal administration and the total revision of the Financial Budget Act serve as objects of in-depth study. Based on the tradition of policy-oriented legislative research the underlying assumption of the analysis is that parliamentarians' influence on legislation varies according to the content of a specific policy. In order to disclose legislators' rationale to intervene in some aspects of the Financial Budget Act while being indifferent towards other regulations, a content analysis of the parliamentary debate over the draft bill is conducted. By matching every statement with the topic(s) addressed an unbiased picture of the debate is obtained. In addition, the amount of statements devoted to a theme makes it possible to highlight 'debate dominating topics' and infer an issue's relevance for parliamentarians. The analysis shows that topics related to the cornerstones of the reform were of low relevance to legislators. Instead, debate dominating topics inhered politically contestable issues. This, in turn, suggests that public managers enjoy substantial freedom of action concerning managerial realms due to politicians' missing demand for it