Post-NPM under Populism – A Comparative Analysis of Bureaucratic Reforms in China and Advanced Industrialised Countries

Post-New Public Management (NPM) thrives in worldwide bureaucracies. However, the practices of the post-NPM pattern are diverse due to the different politico-administrative institutions in each country. Specifically, the rise of populist activities impedes the neutrality of bureaucracy in policy implementation, and concurrently becomes one of the important driving forces in the bureaucratic reforms. By comparing the public reform in China with those in the main advanced industrialized countries after the 2010s, this paper examines the similarities and differences of the post-NPM reform practices from an institutional perspective. It explores the institutional impacts of populism on the post-NPM reforms in terms of historical context, component, implementation method, reform focus and phase, politico-administrative relationship, and value differentiation in China and the main advanced industrialized countries. (Note: core argument and data: The divergences between these influential post-NPM reforms are treated as the results of the path-dependent impacts of the original rules on the new post-NPM elements from a historical-institutionalist perspective. It is based on a three-actor model: (1) political rule makers, (2) bureaucratic rule takers, and (3) social context. The rule makers in bureaucratic reforms are embedded in a concrete historical context that is broadly influenced by populism. Populism is to be discussed as a part of social contentious movement due to the preceding market-centred, capitalist system. In the post-NPM reform, rule makers utilize the populist ideas to re-hierarchize the public-sector organizations after de-hierarchizing bureaucracies in the preceding NPM reform. Populism acts as both deconstructive and constructive dynamics in bureaucratic reforms. The data collections are mainly from the official Chinese documents and from the OECD iLibrary. The secondary sources are the academic works on comparative public reforms and institutionalism.)