Abstract
We are said to live in an age of reform. The past three decades have witnessed the privatization of state-owned enterprises (Feigenbaum et al., 1999), the retrenchment of the welfare state (Pierson, 1994), change in the wider political economy (Hall and Soskice, 2001) as well the reorganization of the ‘administrative state’ itself. Although emerging in largely separate literatures, these studies have produced rather similar findings and conceptual perspectives. One similarity is that far from diagnosing universal paradigm changes and ‘convergence’, scholars have explained that reforms across states and time have varied. Another similarity has been the widespread use of broadly historical institutional perspectives to account for the observed variations. A particularly popular concept has been ‘path dependency’ to highlight how the force of past commitments — in the form of high fixed costs and increasing returns — not only directs common external demands for change into particular national and sectoral reform trajectories, but also exposes states to a specific set of ‘vulnerabilities’ rather than others (see Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000).
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© 2007 Philippe Bezes and Martin Lodge
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Bezes, P., Lodge, M. (2007). Historical Legacies and Dynamics of Institutional Change in Civil Service Systems. In: Raadschelders, J.C.N., Toonen, T.A.J., Van der Meer, F.M. (eds) The Civil Service in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593084_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593084_8
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