The role of public service bargains in cutback management: Insights in reforms in the Dutch penitentiary sector
| Author | Eduard Schmidt |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0952076719869793 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The role of public service
bargains in cutback
management: Insights
in reforms in the Dutch
penitentiary sector
Eduard Schmidt
Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, The Hague,
the Netherlands
Abstract
Public managers need to interact with their political principals when managing cutbacks.
However, research on cutback management did not put much emphasis on this interaction.
We analyse how the interaction between public managers and political principals develops
during cutbacks, and how this affects cutbac k management. We analyse these interactions
between political principals and public managers as a public service bargain. This study
employs an in-depth qualitative case study on recent cutbacks in the Dutch penitentiary
system. The results show that cutbacks put the interaction between public managers and
political principals under pressure. As political principals feel that public managers’ loyalty
towards them is violated, they centralise decision making. Consequently, public managers are
withheld responsibility for cutback management. Strong resistance to cutbacks from public
managers and subsequent political uproar leads to both actors having to find a new balance
in the bargain. Furthermore, it leads to change s in both the content (what is cut back back)
and the process (how are cutbacks decided upon and implemented) of cutback management.
The first conclusion of this study and our contribution to the cutback management literature
is that if we want to understand the work and behaviour of public managers during cutbacks,
we cannot neglect the political context public managers work in. Second, we contribute to
the literature on PSBs, as we conclude that cutbacks, even if they do not impact the insti-
tutional, formal part of the bargain, have the potential to affect public service bargains and
thus, the interactions between public managers and political principals.
Keywords
Cutback management, political-administrative relationships, public management, public
service bargain
Public Policy and Administration
2021, Vol. 36(1) 19–40
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076719869793
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Corresponding author:
Eduard Schmidt, Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, Turfmarkt 99, PO Box 13228, The
Hague 2501 EE, The Netherlands.
Email: j.e.t.schmidt@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Introduction
The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 forced many governments throughout the
world to implement cutbacks. Financial decline may transform organizations to
political arenas (Mintzberg, 1985) where public managers and politicalprincipals
face the difficult task of finding ways to manage cutbacks, especially since public
organizations cannot easily choose to stop their services (Levine, 1979) and
demands for high-quality public service remain ever-present. Research on cut-
back management shows that cutbacks often leads to centralised decision-
making (Raudla et al., 2015), with only the key political and administrative
leaders (i.e. public managers) involved.
Cutback management research acknowledges that the interaction between
public managers and political principals is important to understand cutback
management (Cepiku et al., 2016; Kickert and Randma-Liiv, 2017). Both public
managers and political superiors can be assumed to be strategic and goal-oriented
actors (Kuipers et al., 2014) whose strategic interaction can influence cutback man-
agement and each actor’s role within such processes. So far, cutback management
research taking the political-administrative context into account tends to focus on
issues such as fiscal consolidation at the macro-level, rather than addressing the
managerial challenges that come with cutbacks (Schmidt et al., 2017). This study,
therefore, asks a twofold question: how does the strategic interaction between pol-
itical principals and public managers develop during cutbacks, and how does this
affect the cutback management process? This study’s first and primary aim is to con-
tribute to cutback management, by studying how the interaction between political
principals and public managers affects cutback management.
We analyse the strategic interactions between political principals and public
managers as a public service bargain (PSB). PSBs refer to ‘‘explicit or implicit
agreements between public servants -the civil or uniformed services of the state-
and those they serve’’ (Hood and Lodge, 2006: 6) and capture the formal and
informal relationship between public managers and political principals. Changes
in bargains can be the result of changes in the environment (Salomonsen and
Knudsen, 2011). Especially crises, such as cutbacks, represent ‘‘the hour of the
executive’’ (Lodge and Wegrich, 2012: 2) and have a strong potential to affect
PSBs. Next to contributing to cutback management, our second aim is to contrib-
ute to theory development on PSBs by giving insight into how PSBs develop in the
context of cutbacks.
A single case study of cutbacks at the Dutch Custodial Institutions Agency
(DJI)
1
is used to capture the interconnectedness of the different concepts and to
generate a rich and detailed study of the interface between politics and bureaucracy
(Rubin and Baker, 2018). The case of DJI is an insightful case for studying
political-administrative interactions, as public managers in this organization were
confronted with cutbacks of more than 25% of the budget. Cutting back on prisons
is regarded as a highly political issue in the Netherlands, because safety is high on
the political agenda, and because prisons are major employers, especially in the
periphery. In such a case, public managers and political principals need to act
20 Public Policy and Administration 36(1)
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