The role of politics and institutions in the Italian administrative reform trajectory

This article applies broad conceptual categories of comparative politics to the explanation of administrative reforms in Italy. It takes as its argument some lines of influence on public sector reform of the features of the party system in Italy, the executive-legislative balance, the politician-bureaucrat relationship, and the role of administrative law. In the search for explanations for the trajectory of administrative reform, pre-existing political and institutional factors also have to be interpreted through the lens of negotiated change occurring via processes of conversion and layering involving new and old institutions that has taken place in Italy since the ‘political crisis' began in 1992.