Efficiency. Innovation. Results. Accountability. These, advocates claim, are the fruits of performance management. In recent decades government organizations have eagerly embraced the performance ...model-but the rush to reform has not delivered as promised. Drawing on research from state and federal levels, Moynihan illustrates how governments have emphasized some aspects of performance management-such as building measurement systems to acquire more performance data-but have neglected wider organizational change that would facilitate the use of such information. In his analysis of why and how governments in the United States have made the move to performance systems, Moynihan identifies agency leadership, culture, and resources as keys to better implementation, goal-based learning, and improved outcomes. How do governments use the performance information generated under performance systems? Moynihan develops a model of interactive dialogue to highlight how performance data, which promised to optimize decision making and policy change for the public's benefit, has often been used selectively to serve the interests of particular agencies and individuals, undermining attempts at interagency problem solving and reform. A valuable resource for public administration scholars and administrators,The Dynamics of Performance Managementoffers fresh insight into how government organizations can better achieve their public service goals.
For over a century, the value of employee protections and limits on direct political control has been the sine qua non of a merit‐based bureaucracy for the US public service. Such assumptions are at ...odds with the desire of populist governments to exert control over institutions of governance. This tension emerged during the Trump administration. Trump's Schedule F Executive Order sought to transform much of the career public service into political appointees, allowing them to be removed if they were not performing according to the president's goals. In the chaotic last days of the Trump administration, the order was not implemented, but Schedule F offers both a glimpse of an alternative process for public management policymaking that excludes the field of public administration, as well as a potential harbinger for the future of the US civil service.
One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various ...disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resources, especially executive functioning, interrelate. The article then presents illustrative examples, highlighting three common life factors—scarcity, health problems, and age‐related cognitive decline. These factors create a human capital catch‐22, increasing people's likelihood of needing state assistance while simultaneously undermining the cognitive resources required to negotiate the burdens they encounter while seeking such assistance. The result is to reduce access to state benefits and increase inequality. The article concludes by calling for scholars of behavioral public administration and public administration more generally to incorporate more attention to human capital into their research.
This article examines the application of a structural innovation known as Incident Command Systems (ICS) in different crises. The ICS seeks to coordinate multiple response organizations under a ...temporary hierarchical structure. The ICS is of practical interest because it has become the dominant mechanism by which crisis response is organized in the United States. It is of theoretical interest because it provides insights into how a highly centralized mode of network governance operates. Despite the hierarchical characteristics of the ICS, the network properties of crisis response fundamentally affects its operations, in terms of the coordination difficulties that multiple members bring, the ways in which authority is shared and contested between members, and the importance of trust in supplementing formal modes of control.
This article surveys the policy feedback framework developed in political science and clarifies its implications for public administration. A feedback perspective encourages us to ask how policy ...implementation transforms the webs of political relations that constitute governance. Administrators play a key role in shaping the political conditions of bureaucratic performance and the organization of power in the broader polity. At the same time, this perspective underscores that policies are more than just objects of administrative action. Policies are political forces in their own right that can alter key components of administration, including phenomena such as organizational capacity, structures, routines, authorities, motivations and cultures. These sorts of administrative themes have received little attention in policy feedback research, just as the political effects of policies have been overlooked in public administration studies. Bridging these perspectives offers a basis for exciting new agendas and advances in public administration research.
This article examines learning in networks dealing with conditions of high uncertainty. The author examines the case of a crisis response network dealing with an exotic animal disease outbreak. The ...article identifies the basic difficulties of learning under crisis conditions. The network had to learn most of the elements taken for granted in more mature structural forms-the nature of the structural framework in which it was working, how to adapt that framework, the role and actions appropriate for each individual, and how to deal with unanticipated problems. The network pursued this learning in a variety of ways, including virtual learning, learning forums, learning from the past, using information systems and learning from other network members. Most critically, the network used standard operating procedures to provide a form of network memory and a command and control structure to reduce the institutional and strategic uncertainty inherent in networks.
Abstract
Administrative burdens affect peoples’ experience of public administration but there is, to date, limited evidence to as why policymakers are willing to accept and impose burdens. To address ...this gap, we draw from the policy design and administrative burden literatures to develop the concept of burden tolerance—the willingness of policymakers and people more generally to passively allow or actively impose state actions that result in others experiencing administrative burdens. Drawing on a survey experiment and observational data with Danish local politicians in a social welfare setting, we find that more right-wing politicians are more tolerant of burdens, but politicians are less willing to impose burdens on a welfare claimant perceived as being more deserving. Politicians with a personal experience of receiving welfare benefits themselves are less tolerant of burdens, while information about the psychological costs experienced by claimants did not reduce burden tolerance.
This article proposes that understanding public employee use of performance information is perhaps the most pressing challenge for scholarship on performance management. Governments have devoted ...extraordinary effort in creating performance data, wagering that it will be used to improve governance, but there is much we do not know about the factors associated with the use of that information. This article examines the antecedents of self-reported performance information use from a survey of local government managers. The results show that public service motivation, leadership role, information availability, organizational culture, and administrative flexibility all affect performance information use.
Politicians engage in, and the media amplifies, social constructions of welfare recipients as undeserving. Such messaging seeks to influence mass public opinion, but what are the effects on the ...target population receiving welfare benefits? We test if deservingness messaging affects welfare recipients' mental health. To do so, we exploit a quasi-experiment entailing a dramatic shift in deservingness messaging after a welfare recipient in Denmark became the subject of a national debate, utilizing detailed administrative data on the ensuing consumption of antidepressants by other welfare recipients. We find evidence that welfare recipients experienced worse mental health outcomes after being exposed to deservingness messaging, reflected in a 1.2-percentage-point increase in the use of antidepressants in the weeks following the airing of a critical interview. Deservingness messaging particularly affected more vulnerable groups who had a history of mental health problems.
The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 provided a well-studied framework for U.S. federal performance management initiatives. In the aftermath of the update of GPRA in 2010 with ...the GPRA Modernization Act, the authors offer the first systematic scholarly assessment of the new legislation. Managerial use of performance data was an explicit goal of the Modernization Act, an objective that eluded prior federal reforms. The Modernization Act established a new series of performance routines to encourage performance information use. The analysis shows that as federal managers experience those routines, they are more likely to report using performance data to make decisions. Specifically, routines centered on the pursuit of cross-agency priority goals, the prioritization of a small number of agency goals, and data-driven reviews are all associated with higher rates of performance information use. The authors also find that managers in better-run data-driven reviews report greater use of performance data.
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