Various reforms of New Public Management have been implemented in Switzerland in the last 20 years. At the same time, there has been continuous development of policy evaluation, and Swiss public administration units have established evaluation cultures. The proposed paper clarifies the relationship between evaluation culture and NPM using a causal-process tracing approach. Analysing the public administration units of some Swiss cantons in the health and education domain, the paper examines the mutual influence between two core instruments of NPM, namely, performance and impact targets with performance and impact indicators, and lump sum budgeting, and two important elements of the evaluation culture, namely, evaluation activity, and institutionalization of evaluation. This examination is relevant from a theoretical and a practical point of view: There has been lively theoretical debate on whether NPM reforms reinforce policy evaluation or NPM performance indicators that focus on administrative outputs substitute for (replace) policy outcome evaluation.
