Public Management Policymaking in Spain: The Politics of Legislative Reform of Administrative Structures, 1991–1997

Abstract

This case study focuses on extending research knowledge about the politics of public management policymaking in Spain. The case involves legislating to change politically sensitive features of the central government and administration. The study explains such analytically significant event conditions as: an agenda‐setting process that made a policy issue of the formal, structural attributes of state administration, an alternative‐specification process that proceeded without complication, and a decisional process that lasted five years and in which political leaders' positions on the issue flip‐flopped. Broadly speaking, the case analysis demonstrates that when policy proposals take the form of legislation, the politics of public management policymaking in Spain are highly influenced by political stream factors, themselves reflecting Spain's parliamentary form of government and relations between statewide and regional political parties.