The analysis of public management reform from a political science perspective is very recent. Although public management policy has been on the governmental agenda of numerous countries over the past two decades, political scientists have not shown interest in this topic. This is striking, not least because public management reform is about institutional change, and institutions have traditionally been a central object of study in political science. Only over the past five years some public administration academics (Capano 2003, Christensen and Laegreid 2001, Hood 2000, 2004, James 2003, Knill 1999, Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000) and some public management scholars (Barzelay 2001) have shifted to a political science view of this phenomenon, by making incursions into the use of the main theoretical approaches in the discipline. Until then, the study of these public management reforms had led to the production of a massive body of literature around the so-called 'new public management'. However, most of it was atheoretical and, as a result, the why and how of public management reforms were not explained.Against this background, the recent shift to a political science angle to study public management reforms has led to substantive progress in the use of analytical tools that may lead to improve their understanding. However, most of this new literature has adopted the approach of 'new institutionalism' -including works within the historical, rational choice and sociological schools (Hall and Taylor 1996), thereby reflecting a prevailing paradigm within the discipline of political science since the early 1980s. However, another line of research on public management reforms has also developed, which is not easily categorized within 'new institutionalism'. Its antecedents can be found directly in the 1990s (Campbell and Halligan 1992, Campbell and Wilson 1995, March and Olsen 1989, Olsen and Peters 1996) and more indirectly in the literature on the policy making process (Kingdon 1995, Heclo 1974, Lindblom 1980). Although being fully within political science, scholars within this line see themselves as centered outside 'new institutionalism'. In fact, given their focus on process dynamics, a different label could best apply to identify their approach: 'institutional processualism'.Looking forward, this relative success/favorable development could usher in a period of complacency among scholars researching on public management reform. This eventuality would stunt the growth of knowledge about this important aspect of executive institutions, much as happened in the 90s with the preoccupation with the concept of NPM. This paper aims to open this debate. The issues this paper deals with are: a) How do you attain generalizations about process dynamics of public management reforms that are sensitive to the institutional context? b) How do we get insight into the aspects of public management reforms that involve leadership, learning from experience, creativity in the formulation of substantive policy areas? c) Should the pattern of methodological commitments evident in the field at this point be cast as an opposition between 'new institutionalism' and an alternative label -namely, 'institutional processualism'? This paper addresses these three issues to usher in a sustained theoretical and methodological discussion about public management reform.

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