Un jeu redistribué sous la cinquième République : nouvelles formes et nouveaux acteurs de la réforme de l'Etat

Abstract

Publicising and politicising administrative issues : genealogy of the reform of the neo-liberal state in the 1970s The 1970s are an important period for our understanding of the contemporary phenomenon of state reform. During that period, three dynamics contributed to the notion of the administration as a “public problem”. The press increasingly decried bureaucracy, devoting page after page to the only remedy for it, administrative reform. This made for a publicising and “socialising” of administrative matters, previously shaped only by internal issues of the state apparatus. During the same period, the administration also became a subject of political importance, at the core of a two-sided electoral competition with rightand left-wing programmes. Inherent in this politicisation was the demand for greater control of the administration by elected representatives. Then, New Public Management and its neo-liberal recipes began making their way to top-level administration and feeding into various reform positions, as testified to by the writings of high-level civil servants published in the 1970s. These partially independent but nonetheless interwoven elements continued to shape and naturalise “state reform”, the critical attention paid to the functioning and arcane complexities of administrative machinery.

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