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 isrelated to the argument that country-level differences in the adoption of New PublicManagement significantly alter the Public Service Bargains of top civil servants andconsequently 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