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The Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the basic institutional rules attributed powers to the Autonomous Communities with which to design and structure their public administration, based on a model of institutional isomorphism. At present, the autonomous public sector is of unequal nature in terms of organisation, motivated by decisions taken in its regulation during the process of transformation and innovation of the res publica in recent decades. This paper aims at reviewing the processes of administrative change and modernization, where a reflection on the evolution of organisational theory from a neo-institutionalist perspective is assumed. Hence, professional public management arises as a tool able to help public administrations face current challenges that put at risk their sustainability in the 21st century, especially during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, institutionalism and professionalization, beyond seeming to be mutually exclusive concepts, must be combined from a neo-weberian perspective. This study analyses the public political-administrative subsystem in the Autonomous Community of Cantabria to check the correlation between the degree of politicisation of the senior civil service and the legislation on professional public management in the last decades of institution-building in this Autonomous Community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]