LIST OF PANELS

Public Administration Paradigms (PAP) refer to the body of doctrines and justifications that support the exercise of public management and the relationship between State and Society, including bureaucratic, new public management, and new public governance models. The objective of the panel is to study PAP and the models of public policy analysis, which apply to the decision of how PAP is practiced in Southern European and Latin American countries.

Over the last years, administrative reforms in national / federal public administrations and changes in policy making styles have been marked by international pressure to promote institutional isomorphism and mimicry. On the other hand, evidence has shown that not always countries choose to follow the same international tendencies in their administrative reform styles. Formal (i.e. Statutes, rules, formal organizational structures) and informal attributes (organizational culture, values, political-administrative conventions) in each political-administrative system seem to act as a barrier to the diffusion of public administration paradigms.

In this panel, the adopted theoretical reference is the new historical and sociological institutionalism (Di Maggio & Powell, 1991; March & Olsen, 1992; Pierson, 2000; Thelen, 1999), as well as policy diffusion and policy transfer theories (Benson & Jordan, 2011; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, 2012; Marsh & Sharman, 2009).

In this vein, it is assumed that the adoption of Public Administration Paradigms and Policy Analysis Models are reflections of pressures imposed by normative force, imitation / isomorphism, with great risk of deadlock by the predominant organizational culture and the existence of a gap between organizational culture and organizational structure (Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2014). Comparatively, considering that Southern European and Latin-American countries share several cultural attributes and Ibero-American have the same historical heritage, the problem acquire new meaning and relevance, especially considering the scarcity of empirical studies on these countries.

Adopting a comparative perspective on public administration and public policymaking (Geva-May et al., 2018; Walle & Brans, 2018), the panel proposes the following research question: how have formal and informal institutions facilitated or hindered the adoption of public administration paradigms in Southern European and Latin American countries? What are the prevalent public policy analysis models exercised? The two underlying hypotheses are: 1) Among the Latin American countries there is a discursive convergence of Reform / Modernization of Public Administration Paradigms and Policy Analysis Models guided by external factors (funding agencies and International Organisations such as World Bank, OECD, and the European Union); 2) Among Latin American countries there is stronger administrative persistence (resistance to change) because of institutional reasons (cultural, legal, path dependence), while in Southern Europe there is larger adoption of new administrative and policymaking paradigms by induction, coercion, imitation and normative force by the European Union.

We welcome theoretical and empirical papers with a comparative perspective of regional or single country studies in Latin America and Southern Europe. The following topics are of special interest: public administration models/paradigms, public management reforms, public policy analysis traditions (rationalist vs. argumentative policy analysis), policy design, participation, deliberation, policy diffusion, analysis of the influence institutional factors on public administration and policy formulation.