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Administrative traditions have become a central concept in public policy and public administration research. Despite substantial insights gained, it is still unclear how administrative traditions affect the effectiveness of public policies. This paper addresses this shortcoming. It analyzes whether the effectiveness of a specific type of public policy, namely direct regulation, varies by a country's administrative tradition. Empirically, the focus is on regulations in the area of environmental protection. By analyzing the changes in air pollutant emissions of 14 OECD countries over a period of 25 years, the article finds that the effectiveness of environmental regulations is higher in countries with a managerial administrative tradition. While both managerial and legalistic bureaucracies can successfully implement minor policy reforms, it is primarily managerial systems that can effectively handle more ambitious regulations. Overall, it thus seems that a major benefit of managerial systems is the more flexible approach towards policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the determinants of reforms intending to integrate policies and coordinate administrative units by focusing on necessary conditions. Firstly, we elaborate theoretical expectations about potential necessary conditions for cross-sectoral reforms. Secondly, we conduct a condition-oriented fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine our expectations, based on an original data set comparing policy integration and administrative coordination reforms, in environmental and unemployment policy, across 13 countries over 29 years. Our results indicate three necessary conditions for high reform intensity: external problem pressure is necessary for policy integration and administrative coordination in employment policy; either the strength or weakness of the reference party can take the role of necessary conditions depending on the policy field; low politicization of bureaucracy is necessary, especially for administrative coordination in environmental policy. These findings contribute to the development of a systematic theory of cross-sectoral policy and administrative change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]