New Public Management, Public Service Bargains and the challenges of interdepartmental coordination: a comparative analysis of top civil servants in state administration

In this article we are interested in how the coordinating role of top civil servants is related to the argument that country-level differences in the adoption of New Public Management significantly alter the Public Service Bargains of top civil servants and consequently their capacity to accomplish interdepartmental coordination. A managerial PSB limits top civil servants' role in interdepartmental coordination, as their focus will be on achieving goals set for their specific departments, rather than for the central government as a collective. We test our argument with empirical insights from a comparative analysis of five countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. We find that our argument is only partly valid and discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of the analysis.