This paper presents a research proposal developed for analysing and understanding the public management policy making occurred in Peru between 1990 and 1997. The proposal applies the methodological frame developed by Barzelay et al that is the issue of this panel. In this way, the paper shows how the frame works and can be used to identify relevant research questions and organize the information in order to answer them.The research proposal is oriented to one of the central concerns of public management, that is, how to increase the institutional capacity of public sector for designing, carrying out and evaluating public policies that effectively create public value in a democratic setting? Within this vast matter - that is related to several management fields - the research addresses the subject of public management policy- making. Dealing with the mentioned subject, the research will be focused in a specific - but still broad - topic: the conditions, factors and processes that promote or hamper public management policy change. More precisely, the central purpose of the research is to identify and analyse the political and institutional factors that have significant influence on the change or stability of public management policies.The study is focused on a set of public policy-making processes and choices that occurred in Peru between 1990 and 1997, as an expression of the career of the State Reform issue. From a methodological point of view, we assume this experience as a case, that is, as a single historical experience that is studied as a whole. Within the policy making process to be studied, we identify two different policy cycles (July 1990 - October 1995, and November 1995 - May 1997). Each one can be tackled as different configurations of the policy making process.The two policy cycles under study were oriented to change the public management policies, sharing the same policy ideas about the public management policies. But, while during the first cycle the government tried to promote change by means of a targeted reform method, during the second one it turns towards a comprehensive reform method. In the first case, the policies changed almost radically, but in a scope limited to few public institutions. In the second, no change occurred at all. The central purpose of the research is to explain the policy choices linked to both methods. That will allow us to understand why did public management policies showed a limited change.Considering the research topic and the case experience to be studied, the paper identifies the research questions that will guide the work, suggests a narrative scheme for organising the information, and identify sources of information.

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