Local Government Reforms in Germany

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - Political Systems - Germany, grade: A, Ryerson University (Canada Toronto Ryerson University), course: Public Administration and Governance , language: English, abstract: While frontrunners like the United Kingdom (UK) under Thatcher, the United States under Reagan and the New Zealand began New Public Management (NPM) reforms in the 1980s, Germany's federal government level only showed movement toward modernization in the late 1990s, and efforts still have not gone far enough to be evaluated with confidence. The most notable government reforms were, undertaken by the local governments, which engaged in incremental reforms in the 1980s, and only began engaging in NPM after a ten-year delay in the 1990s, when the UK and other countries had started concentrating government reform efforts on engaging multi-stakeholder networks through local and public governance measures. Focusing on the local level of government I attempt to explain the puzzle as to why Germany was a decade behind in adopting NPM measures, and why the initiative to reform public management started primarily at the local level and remains mainly limited to the local level of government. Subsequently, the purpose of this paper is to illustrate to what extent local government reforms in Germany vary from those perused by the NPM pioneer, the UK. A focus will be on institutional and ideological particularities of the German NPM response, and detailed information about the NPM contents implemented in the Federal Republic will only be mentioned if they support comparative claims. Further, I will provide a broad assessment to what extent German reform feature can be ascribed directly to internation NPM influences. Relevant information about the UK, its governmental structure and reform efforts will be given. Moreover, the structure of the German government system, and local government reforms since the 1960s will be elucidated, followed by an evaluation of reasons as well as initiators behind reform efforts. Lastly, the reform effort in Germany will be broadly compared to those in the UK in order to classify the local administrative reforms in the Federal Republic.