Heuristics and political accountability in complex governance: An experimental test:

A growing body of empirical work suggests that identifying the actors formally tasked with implementing policy can focus attention away from incumbent politicians. We examine the effects on blame attribution and voting intention of (a) the identifiability of a responsible policy worker (administrator), and (b) the evaluability of the policy work or outcome (policy failure), in the context of programs at two federal agencies (loans by the Small Business Administration and inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Using a set of online survey experiments with 1105 US adults, we find that the evaluability of a (negative) outcome generally reduces voting intention, but that the identifiability of a policy worker (administrator) tends to shift blame away from the incumbent politician and thus to increase voting intention. These experimental findings provide at least partial support for our theoretical expectations

Behavioral public performance: making effective use of metrics about government activity

Oliver James, Donald Moynihan, Asmus Olsen and Gregg van Ryzin discuss how insights from behavioural science show the way managers, politicians and citizens make sense of, and act on, information about government performance

Motivated reasoning about public performance: An experimental study of how citizens judge the affordable care act

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this recordPublic performance reporting is often promoted as a means to better inform citizens' judgments of public services. However, political psychology has found evidence of motivated reasoning, with citizens' accuracy motives often supplanted by biased searching for and evaluation of information to defend prior political attitudes, beliefs or identities. We conducted a survey experiment to evaluate motivated reasoning about the performance of the US Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), which has been politically contentious. In the experiment, we randomly assigned a sample of US adults to either a politics prime, to encourage partisan motivated reasoning, or a health care needs prime, to encourage accuracy motived reasoning stemming from their own perceived need for health care. We then asked them to rate the strength of real performance information in the form of evidence statements about the Affordable Care Act and to choose real performance indicators from a graphical array. The findings show that the political prime strengthened partisan differences in both the ratings of evidence statements and the selection of performance indicators. Thus, for contentious public programs where partisan identities are activated, partisan motivated reasoning influences how citizens process performance information and thus may limit its potential for enhancing democratic accountability

Correlates of Co-production: Evidence From a Five-Nation Survey of Citizens

We employ data from an original survey of citizens in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Czech Republic to examine correlates of citizen co-production of public services in three key policy areas: public safety, the environment, and health. The correlates of co-production we consider include demographic factors (age, gender, education, and employment status), community characteristics (urban, non-urban), performance perceptions (how good a job government is doing), government outreach (providing information and seeking consultation), and self-efficacy (how much of a difference citizens believe they can make). We also report on results from a series of focus groups on the topic of co-production held in each country. Our results suggest that women and elderly citizens generally engage more often in co-production and that self-efficacy—the belief that citizens can make a difference—is an especially important determinant across sectors. Interestingly, good outcome performance (in the sense of a safe neighborhood, a clean environment, and good health) seems to discourage co-production somewhat. Thus citizens' co-production appears to depend in part on awareness of a shortfall in public performance on outcomes. Our results also provide some evidence that co-production is enhanced when governments provide information or engage citizens in consultation. The specific determinants vary, however, not only by sector but across national contexts

The Top-Dog Index: A New Measurement for the Demand Consistency of the Size Distribution in Pre-Pack Orders for a Fashion Discounter with Many Small Branches

We propose the new Top-Dog-Index, a measure for the branch-dependent historic deviation of the supply data of apparel sizes from the sales data of a fashion discounter. A common approach is to estimate demand for sizes directly from the sales data. This approach may yield information for the demand for sizes if aggregated over all branches and products. However, as we will show in a real-world business case, this direct approach is in general not capable to provide information about each branch's individual demand for sizes: the supply per branch is so small that either the number of sales is statistically too small for a good estimate (early measurement) or there will be too much unsatisfied demand neglected in the sales data (late measurement). Moreover, in our real-world data we could not verify any of the demand distribution assumptions suggested in the literature. Our approach cannot estimate the demand for sizes directly. It can, however, individually measure for each branch the scarcest and the amplest sizes, aggregated over all products. This measurement can iteratively be used to adapt the size distributions in the pre-pack orders for the future. A real-world blind study shows the potential of this distribution free heuristic optimization approach: The gross yield measured in percent of gross value was almost one percentage point higher in the test-group branches than in the control-group branches.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figure