Strategic political steering
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Author | Minna Tiili |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852307075691 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Strategic political steering: exploring the qualitative change in
the role of ministers after NPM reforms
Minna Tiili
Abstract
This article explores strategic political steering after New Public Management
reforms, focusing on the new role assigned to government ministers. The NPM
model of strategic steering and the problems embedded in it are addressed. The
primary empirical data concern the practices of strategic political steering in
Finland. The Finnish experience is contrasted with existing evidence from the UK
and Australia and from Nordic local politics. The empirical conclusion is that man-
agement reforms aiming at introducing the strategic role of politicians have not
been a success. Theoretically, this is not a surprise as politics does not follow the
logic of rational managerial models. Politicians are not eager to define goals and
to set priorities, nor are they motivated to consider issues that are not realized in
the immediate future. In addition, they tend to focus on specific issues and to
intervene in details. Consequently, it may not be relevant to ask whether ministers
are able to adopt the strategic role but to consider the possibility that they do not,
and will not, have incentives to do so, making it quite frustrating to develop ration-
al managerial models as tools for politicians.
Points for practitioners
This article explores strategic political steering after New Public Management
reforms, focusing on the new role assigned to government ministers. The primary
empirical data concern the practices of strategic political steering in Finland. The
Finnish experience is contrasted with existing evidence from the UK and Australia
and from Nordic local politics. In all these settings, management reforms that have
tried to make politicians strategic leaders have not been a success. This article con-
cludes that it is more likely that the failure of rational managerial models in politics
is explained by the nature of politics itself, rather than by the inability of politicians.
Minna Tiili is Researcher, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science University of Helsinki,
Finland.
Copyright © 2007 IIAS, SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 73(1):81–94 [DOI:10.1177/0020852307075691]
82 International Review of Administrative Sciences 73(1)
The nature of politics creates incentives that do not favour the strategic role that
has been suggested to politicians. Politicians are not eager to define goals and to
set priorities, nor are they motivated to consider issues that are not realized in the
immediate future. In addition, they tend to focus on specific issues and to inter-
vene in details. This is a true challenge for those who develop strategic tools for
politicians, and in general, rational managerial models for politics.
Keywords: decentralization, ministers, NPM, politics, strategic management
Introduction
Strategic political steering is a concept that tries to capture the qualitative change that
political leaders have to manage in countries that have gone through New Public
Management type of reforms. Since public management is intertwined with politics,
it is not only administration but also political decision-makers who are affected by the
reforms of public management. The focus of this article is on government ministers,
who are the political heads of administration. The consequences of NPM-type
reforms for the political executives have not been analysed in depth (see, however,
Zifcak, 1994; Marsh et al., 2001; Peters and Pierre, 2001; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004).
This article explores strategic political steering after New Public Management
reforms, first from a theoretical point of view, and second, empirically, using both
existing international evidence and the Finnish evidence collected by the author.
At the general level, NPM introduced a new role for ministers, that of strategist
and opinion-leader (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004: 150). Ministers are expected to
‘clarify and communicate visions and values, choose appropriate strategies and iden-
tify, allocate and commit resources at the macro-level’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004:
150). Professional managers, then, will take care of management and operations and
their performance is assessed against clear objectives and targets set by ministers.
This distribution of work between politicians and civil servants, or in the new
language, managers, entails decentralization. Aucoin (1997: 196) argues that the
newness of decentralization in the context of NPM lies in the logic where it is
assumed that decentralization both secures, or even increases, strategic political
direction and control, and at the same time improves management in the use of
resources and in the delivery of public services. However, it is unreasonable to expect
that decentralization automatically results in increased strategic political steering, at
least if politicians are not prepared for their new role. Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004:
150) are sceptical about this new role: ministers may not have the skills required, nor
incentives to adopt the role suggested by NPM. Thus, it seems obvious that there are
some problems with this notion of ministers as ‘strategic leaders’.
The article is organized as follows. First, the idea of strategic steering as part of
NPM is introduced. Next, existing international evidence about politicians adapting to
this strategic role is presented. The Finnish experience is analysed in more detail.
Finally, conclusions sum up the international and Finnish experiences of strategic
political steering, leading to theoretical discussion about the possible explanations for
the modest success of management models that have aimed at introducing the
strategic role of politicians.
Tiili Strategic political steering in Finland 83
The empirical evidence collected by the author concerns the Finnish case and is
based on interviews and documentary analysis. Documents of administrative reform
between 1987 and 2003 are analysed. To begin with the year 1987 is quite estab-
lished in the context of Finnish administrative reforms, because in 1987, the
Permanent Ministerial Committee for Public Management Reform was established
and the following years entailed several reform programmes, giving rise to the con-
cept of the ‘reform wave’ of 1987–95 (Temmes and Kiviniemi, 1997). While reform
documents are studied since 1987, it is reasonable to assume that the consequences
of reform talk and action are not visible until years have passed. Management by
Results, which was the first reform to launch the idea of the strategic role of ministers
in Finland, was implemented between 1988 and 1995. Other tools of strategic
steering, frame budgeting and the strategy portfolio were introduced later, frame
budgeting first in 1991 and the strategy portfolio in 1995. Consequently, the
practices of strategic steering are studied only after the Cabinet change in 1995.
Interviews were the main method to study the actual practices of strategic steering.
Interview data cover 14 interviews with top officials in 2002, and 14 interviews with
ministers in 2003. The interview data describe the practices of strategic steering in
Lipponen’s two Cabinets between 1995 and 2003, emphasis being on the latter
period between 1999 and 2003. Both Lipponen’s Cabinets were grand coalitions of
five parties. Interviews cover all sectors of government, thus providing an overview.1
The interviews were semi-structured with open-ended answers.
The NPM model of strategic steering
NPM as such does not need to be presented.2 What is of interest here is that New
Public Management indicates a change in the steering role of political executives
(Maor, 1999: 8; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004: 150). This change is qualitative by nature
(Christensen and Lægreid, 2003: 119). Christensen and Lægreid (2003) prefer to
discuss political control rather than steering but nevertheless, this qualitative change
implies that emphasis is more on general, long-term policy development and
guidelines and less on short-term specific political involvement. In other words,
‘Executive agencies should no longer be hierarchically controlled from the top
down, but should be steered “at arm’s length” by the department. Thus, political
executives should concentrate on the broad, strategic decisions guiding operational
execution, whereas operational details should be the domain of the agency’ (Maor,
1999: 8).
‘Freeing managers to manage’ entails decentralization. However, decentralization
has involved both ‘letting managers manage’ and ‘making managers manage’
(Aucoin, 1997: 195). In fact, the aim has been to strengthen political steering by
making bureaucracies more responsive to policy direction from the political execu-
tives, in addition to responsiveness to the demands of citizens and economy and
efficiency (Aucoin, 1997). This three-dimensional aim is not without tensions, and
Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004: 164) include NPM’s prescription ‘Increase political control
of the bureaucracy/free managers to manage/empower service consumers’ in their
list of 10 controversies in NPM. Their conclusion is that ‘in a perfect world these could
just about be compatible’ but in a real, less perfect world, this triangle usually leads to
84 International Review of Administrative Sciences 73(1)
trade-offs and in some contexts the trade-off can be so sharp that it actually
becomes a contradiction (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004: 167, 180).
Of this...
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