Balancing Competing Goals

摘要

The main research question is to what extent political parties present different views on the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) elements in health care reforms, in particular a new hospital payment system, and how this diversity can be explained by national contexts and ideological dividing lines between parties. Our content analysis of election manifestos and parliamentary debates shows that the introduction of NPM is marked by differences between parties, party systems and national contexts, but these differences do not make health care a positional issue ‘pur sang’ for three reasons. First, parties refer not so much to health care goals themselves but to the best ways to achieve them, second the party differences are often moderate (especially between established parties) and third they tend to fade away during the parliamentary debates in which the implementation of new hospital payment systems is discussed.