A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science

Part one. Chapter 1: public management policy chang: comparing brazilian cases of Constitutional Reform. 1.1. Introduction 1.2.What is the thesis about: four cases os public management policy processes taht led to contitutional change 1.3. Why the thesis was done 1.4. Why the thesis was done in the way it was 1.5. How the thesis was developed in empirical terms 1.6. How the evidence was modelled and presented 1.7. What are the substantive historical claims underlyng the brazilian experience 1.8. Plausible alternative approaches 1.9. What this thesis is not about 1.10. K]Limitations of the thesis 1.11. Key issues raised by this comparative historical analysis of the brazilian experience Chapter 2: agendas, streams, and entrepreneurs. 2.1. Introduction 2.2. The kaleidoscopic streams 2.3. Time, attention and ambiguity 2.4. Problems: the importance of problem definition 2.5. The policy process 2.6. The political streams 2.7. Coupling the streams 2.8. Enterpreneurs as catalyst and synchronisers 2.9. The multiple stremas model and critics Part two. Chapter 3: national (administrative) state bulding. 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Starting of a regime trnasition 3.3. Dealing with a fragmented state 3.4. Initiating a public management policy reform 3.4. Crossing "the critical years" 3.6. Moving a step forward: new public sector reforms for a "new state" 3.7. Taking advantage of the monentum: thw aftermath 3.8. Explaining the cascade of public management policy changes 3.9. Conclusion Chapter 4: "the reform of the reforms": a reform oriented towards national economic development. 4.1. Introduction 4.2. Engendering public management reforms is a regime change junction 4.3. A reform surrounded by high expectations 4.4. A new constitutional rupture: the coup inside the coup 4.5. The final assembly of policy proposals and the decision-making process 4.5. Heading towards a surprising anti-climax 4.7. Conclusion: analysis

The Brazilian state apparatus is a patchwork built upon a cascade of reform attemts over a span of sixty years. Layers of legislation have produced a complex and inconsistent institutional landscape that has made policy change a hard task. Four major public management policy reforms resultedin significant concstitucional changes. Those reforms produced outcomes in the form of Constitutional provisions and they reshaped the modus operandi of the federal administration. The approach adopted is comparative because it is oriented towards identifying similat]rities and differences among the four cases selected. The pattern of the Brazilian cases is intriguinding because the frequency, variety, and speed of the reforms followed a zigzag course. They do not fit in with the long term, gradual, and cumulative transformations the look olace in many developed countris. Each case study corresponds to a historical episode. The material is organized and analycatically narrated around inconnected events within the episode. Those events were significant un themselves and the clearly hoghlighted aspects os the means-ends chains. The framework adopted for the analysis was developed by Kingdon to explain pre-decisional and decision-making stages of the policy-making process. The reason in the Brazilian context, characterized by fluidity, unclear technologiesm chance, temporal sorting, and attention allocation. Policy change took place when events in the political, problem and policy streams coverged to generate windows of oppotunity, during wich public entrepreneurs puched theis policy colutions through top decision-making arenas. The investigation is centred on the dynamics of the policy processes. The main conclusion of the thesis refers to the essential role performed by entrepreneurs in getting the reforms approved. The influence of the reformers in establiching the default implementation model varied in the four cases because of problems of political feasibility, reformers', rotation, policity discontinuties, transitional legislation inconsistencies, and lack of top down political support