ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, public service employment relations in Italy have experienced a continuous process of reform within a wider design to restructure the public administration as a whole. The most important change occurred in 1992-93, just after the exit of Italy from the European Monetary System (September 1992), the strong devaluation of the national currency and the decision to prepare for participation in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) within the first group of countries, with the connected need to meet the Maastricht criteria for eligibility. Reducing or containing public expenditures, of which wages and salaries of public employees were and are a significant part, became a government imperative. This process coincided with the attempt to move the Italian public administration from a highly legalistic system, typical of the Napoleonic state tradition to which Italy belonged (Kickert 2007; Ongaro 2009, 2011), to a system closer to the private sector principles, to some extent along the guidelines of the New Public Management (NPM) approach, although with uncertainties and peculiarities. It was not a linear process of transformation, conditioned as it was by both economic pressures, further strengthened after the 2008 economic and sovereign debt crisis, and endogenous reasons for reform. After about three decades of change, different layers of administrative reform seem to coexist, not always in a consistent way. In the comparative public administration literature, it is debated whether Italy, once abandoned some features of the Napoleonic state tradition, is an example of NPM failure (Kickert 2007) or the ‘least good fit’ case of the neo-Weberian state prevailing in continental European countries (Pollitt 2007; Bordogna and Neri 2011; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011).
