MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF FEDERAL AGENCIES AND PROGRAMS IN THE USA: AN OVERVIEW AND SOME REFLECTIONS

In this paper, I provide an overview of some of the issues surrounding the measurement of government performance, focusing on the case of the U.S. federal government. After defining government performance and introducing the challenge of measuring it, I examine how this challenge is being addressed at the federal level in the United States. I argue that performance measurement is particularly difficult in this context because under the American constitution, agencies respond to multiple principals, in particular the president and Congress, which often have diverging preferences. I introduce congressional and presidential performance measurement initiatives, especially the Government Performance and Results Act including its recent reform, the Obama administration’s high priority performance goals, and the George W. Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool. I conclude with a brief review of potential undesired agency response to targets (such as the high priority performance goals), drawing on Christopher Hood’s research on gaming. I thank the Academy of Economic Studies, Faculty of Administration and Public Management for inviting me to present this paper as keynote speaker at its conference held in Bucharest, Romania, on June 21-22, 2011, and I thank Rob Greer for helpful research assistance.performance target, measuring performance, federal government.

Credible Commitments in Policy and Administration

The theoretical argument of this dissertation contains a set of conditions under which professional personnel systems serve as political tools to make government efforts to implement public policies credible and reliable, and thus to protect democracy. The dissertation includes two empirical applications, which constitute critical cases for the theoretical argument. The first is a case study of the new merit system for the higher echelons of Mexico's federal public administration. It is based on Mexican academic literature, elite interviews conducted in November 2007, and quantitative analysis of personnel data. The second is a test of the hypothesis that officers operating under merit system protections create stability, using panel data on English local governments in the 1950s and 1960s. It is based on analysis of a panel covering budget shares and political party control. Overall, the findings from both empirical applications lend support to the theoretical argument

Does Natural Resource Wealth Spoil and Corrupt Governments? A New Test of the Resource Curse Thesis

Countries with rich natural resource endowments suffer from lower economic growth and various other ills. This work tests whether the resource curse also extends to the quality of regulation and the level of corruption. A theoretical framework is developed that informs the specification of interactive random effects models. A cross-national panel data set is used to estimate these models. Due to multicollinearity, only an effect of metals and ores exports on corruption can be discerned. Marginal effects computations show that whether nature corrupts or not crucially depends on a country's institutions. A broad tax base and high levels of education appear to serve as inoculations for countries against the side-effects of mineral wealth

Enhancing methodological reporting in Public Administration: The functional equivalents framework

Public administration scholarship reflects a multidisciplinary field in which many theoretical perspectives coexist. However, one of the dark sides of such theoretical pluralism is methodological fragmentation. It may be hard to assess the research quality and to engage with the findings from studies employing different methodologies, thus limiting meaningful conversations. Moreover, the constant race across social sciences to make methodologies more sophisticated may exacerbate the separation between academic and practitioner audiences. In order to counterbalance these two trends, the paper aims at increasing methodological intelligibility in our field. It does so starting from the idea that each methodology entails choices in the conventional phases of research design, data collection and data analysis, and that these choices must be reported (...

Party control, party competition and public service performance

publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticleThis article assesses party effects on the performance of public services. A policy-seeking model, hypothesizing that left and right party control affects performance, and an instrumental model, where all parties strive to raise performance, are presented. The framework also suggests a mixed model in which party effects are contingent on party competition, with parties raising performance as increasing party competition places their control of government at increasing risk. These models are tested against panel data on English local governments’ party control and public service performance. The results question the traditional account of left and right parties, showing a positive relationship between rightwing party control and performance that is contingent on a sufficiently high level of party competition. The findings suggest left–right models should be reframed for the contemporary context

Executive succession in English local government

The authors report the results of the first quantitative study of senior management turnover in English local authorities. Consistent with existing management theory, rates of executive succession were found to be higher in an adverse external environment, and where organizational performance is weak

Public service motivation and performance: a critical perspective

Purpose – A growing body of literature points to the importance of public service motivation (PSM) for the performance of public organizations. The purpose of this paper is to assess the method predominantly used for studying this linkage by comparing the findings it yields without and with a correction suggested by Brewer (2006), which removes the common-method bias arising from employee-specific response tendencies. Design/methodology/approach – First, the authors conduct a systematic review of published empirical research on the effects of PSM on performance and show that all studies found have been conducted at the individual level. Performance indicators in all but three studies were obtained by surveying the same employees who were also asked about their PSM. Second, the authors conduct an empirical analysis. Using survey data from 240 organizational units within the Swiss federal government, the paper compares results from an individual-level analysis (comparable to existing research) to two analyses where the data are aggregated to the organizational level, one without and one with the correction for common-method bias suggested by Brewer (2006). Findings – Looking at the Attraction to Policy-Making dimension of PSM, there is an interesting contrast: While this variable is positively correlated with performance in both the individual-level analysis and the aggregated data analysis without the correction for common-method bias, it is not statistically associated with performance in the aggregated data analysis with the correction. Originality/value – The analysis is the first to assess the robustness of the performance-PSM linkage to a correction for common-method bias. The findings place the validity of at least one part of the individual-level linkage between PSM and performance into question

Public service motivation and performance: a critical perspective

Purpose – A growing body of literature points to the importance of public service motivation (PSM) for the performance of public organizations. The purpose of this paper is to assess the method predominantly used for studying this linkage by comparing the findings it yields without and with a correction suggested by Brewer (2006), which removes the common-method bias arising from employee-specific response tendencies. Design/methodology/approach – First, the authors conduct a systematic review of published empirical research on the effects of PSM on performance and show that all studies found have been conducted at the individual level. Performance indicators in all but three studies were obtained by surveying the same employees who were also asked about their PSM. Second, the authors conduct an empirical analysis. Using survey data from 240 organizational units within the Swiss federal government, the paper compares results from an individual-level analysis (comparable to existing research) to two analyses where the data are aggregated to the organizational level, one without and one with the correction for common-method bias suggested by Brewer (2006). Findings – Looking at the Attraction to Policy-Making dimension of PSM, there is an interesting contrast: While this variable is positively correlated with performance in both the individual-level analysis and the aggregated data analysis without the correction for common-method bias, it is not statistically associated with performance in the aggregated data analysis with the correction. Originality/value – The analysis is the first to assess the robustness of the performance-PSM linkage to a correction for common-method bias. The findings place the validity of at least one part of the individual-level linkage between PSM and performance into question