The Public Sector Doesn't Yield. To Reforms

The traditional portrait of civil servants in Italy, as well as in most other countries, has always been one of not particularly efficient employees, yet enjoying the benefit of a secure job and a comfortable retirement package. Public management reforms have tried to change this situation since the early Nineties but academics and practitioners still claim some inertia in the reform implementation and, above all, they wonder about determinants of higher productivity and better performances among public sector officers.

Two studies, recently published in premier academic journals in public administration, investigate this area. In Civil Service Reforms in Italy: The Importance of External Endorsement and Administrative Leadership (in Governance, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2011, pp. 261–283, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2011.01524.x) Greta Nasi, Alex Turrini and Giovanni Valotti (Department of Institutional Analysis and Public Management) with Daniela Cristofoli (Università di Lugano) aim to identify the determinants of inertia in Italy's civil service reforms. They analyze data from 885 Italian municipalities expected to adopt the pay system reform for senior officials, as required by national legislature. They underline that political leaders (that can benefit from the accrued legitimacy in implementing reforms) and key administrative leaders (like city managers) are indeed the major vehicles to promote or slow down the implementation of administrative reforms in the public sector. In particular, the Italian case shows that city managers have opposed the reforms. The interpretation of this behavior is twofold: either they have behaved like "bureaucrats in disguise" (resisting the implementation of managerial reforms as they wanted their vested interests to be untouched) or as "down-to-earth managers" (wisely relying on the public management literature that shows that monetary incentives are not so effective in improving staff performance).

The second study, Coming Back Soon: Assessing the Determinants of Absenteeism in the Public Sector by Daniela Cristofoli, Alex Turrini and Giovanni Valotti (in Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 75–89, February 2011, doi: 10.1080/13876988.2011.538542), explores how different factors influence productivity (i.e.: absenteeism) in the public sector. The research investigates whether absence rates at work vary as a result of the individual personal traits of civil servants, some organizational features of governments and the context where public agencies operate. The study elaborates on the data on self-reported days of absence for all civil servants working for Italian regional and local governments. The analysis shows that in Italy factors linked to the community where governments operate primarily influence the absence trends of civil servants. Absenteeism (or low productivity) is therefore a deep-seatedphenomenon depending not only on easily manageable circumstances (such as the presence of control and supervision mechanisms or the adoption of performance-based pay systems), but from structural situations, such as women's social and economic status or their traditional responsibilities for the home and family or the existence of cultural standards that effectively command attendance (regardless of how satisfied a person is with their job) instead of legitimating absence as a response to job dissatisfaction. Civil service personnel policies (aiming only to change legislation on job protection and benefit systems in order to reduce the incentives leading to individual absenteeism) may be ineffective: they should be accompanied by important policy actions promoting cultural changes such as the need to promote greater interest in the government among the general public (so they care more) and the need to stress a sense of belonging (or ''pride'') among civil servants.