ABSTRACT
New Public Management (NPM) emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a new model of public administration, albeit with antecedents in earlier debates in several countries on how to modernize the public administration and increase its efficiency. Various market-type mechanisms as well as other forms of decentralization or autonomization were adopted in the name of efficiency and customerization. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that there are values inherent in traditional systems of public administration, which still matter a great deal. Citizens still appreciate impartiality, procedural justice, legal security and equal treatment at the same time as they favor customer choice and market-based service delivery. This problematic is far from a theoretical artifact; public service institutions around the world daily face the issue of balancing objectives of efficiency and cost-cutting against the mission to uphold due process, equality, equity, and legality. This raises the question of the consistency of NPM with traditional legalistic values which are embedded in public administration systems. These values are more pronounced in some systems than others; while Europeans define most of these values in terms of a Rechtsstaat model of public administration, many Anglo-Americans would probably prefer the notion of the public interest.1 That having been said, observers on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the public administration is a keystone of democratic governance, and tampering with the exchange patterns between society and the administration is essentially tampering with the democratic process.2
