Political science and public policy scholars have long emphasized the importance of understanding reform in public bureaucracies. Adopting a ‘systematic’ approach to reviewing the literature, this paper investigates when, why and how institutional change in key monetary and fiscal macroeconomic bureaucracies (i.e., central bank, Treasury, and Ministry of Finance) takes place. It reviews 29 articles on the institutional change in such bureaucracies published in Thomson & Reuters Web of Knowledge’s Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), JSTOR, Sage and Wiley databases from 1993 to 2012. It shows that the current state of knowledge about the institutional change in key macroeconomic bureaucracies is characterized by the lack of sufficient bridge building within variants of institutional approaches, and between institutional theory and public policy theory, persisting knowledge gaps and theoretical inconsistencies. Against this background, the present review contributes to the body of knowledge on this topic in two main areas. First, the literature is reviewed systematically in order to provide an overview of the key theoretical and empirical characteristics of institutional change. Second, gaps and future avenues of research are identified in order to stimulate progress in this important area of study.
