Applying A Public Management Perspective To Anti-Corruption Policy Implementation. An Empirical Analysis On The Role Of Public Management For Effective Policy Implementation In The Healthcare Sector In Italy

The dissertation investigates the process of anti-corruption policy implementation in Italian local health agencies from a public management perspective. In detail, it is aimed at empirically investigating the implementation of the anti-corruption policy in Italian Local Health Agencies by following a nested research design, which ends up with a controlled comparison of two Local Health Agencies in order to shed light on the process of implementation of a new anti- corruption regulation issued by the Italian Government in November 2012 after several recommendations coming from international bodies such as the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body (GRECO). The perspective embraced by the author during the investigation is a public management perspective, that focusing on the achievement of the desired outputs of the implementation process in Italian Local Health Agencies aims at testing a “managerial quality hypothesis” as a tentative framework to investigate the ultimate role that public managers exert on the successful achievement of policy implementation and management. Various factors are controlled during the investigation, including relevant regional healthcare features and critical agencies’ features- e.g. the levels of healthcare spending per inhabitant, important regional Quality of Government indicators like the regional levels of perceived impartiality and corruption of healthcare, as well as particular agencies’ features like human resource and financial capacities. Finally, the results and conclusion sections are aimed to trace the process of implementation in the particular agencies and to provide insights for the improvement of anti-corruption policy implementation and management at a sub-national level of government in Italy. The results of the study show that the complex system of accountability and punishment introduced by the law, however claiming a bottom-up approach to the problem, still seems to result in practice as a typical top-down implementation with several implications on the successful achievement of the desired goals of the implementation process in Italian Local Health Agencies