Public policy and administration: tradition, history and reforms

Introduction This chapter addresses the issue of how to interpret the inuence of the past on contemporary public administration and public policies. Historical Institutionalism (HI) is the chosen theory of reference for explaining tradition and the inuence of the past – or, put dierently, for explaining the inuence of context as the consolidation of past choices and events on present choices and events (Pollitt 2013; Pollitt and Dan 2011).