A Multiple–Indicator Approach to Municipal Service Evaluation: Correlating Performance Measurement and Citizen Satisfaction across Jurisdictions

Early work on municipal service–quality assessment recommended multiple measures of performance from both providers and users. Citizen satisfaction surveys have rivaled their more quantitative counterpart, administrative performance measures, in adoption, but the implication of survey results for action is not well understood by managers or scholars. To achieve meaningfully integrated multiple measures of service quality, we need to explore the dimensions of citizen satisfaction and review patterns of satisfaction across localities. We also need to understand the relationship between administrative performance measures and citizen perceptions. This cross–sectional analysis of municipal citizen satisfaction and performance benchmark data suggests that citizen satisfaction survey results are useful to managers in conjunction with performance–measurement programs as part of a multiple–indicator approach to evaluating municipal service quality. However, understanding citizen perceptions requires a different perspective than that applied to administrative service performance measurement.     

Management Activity and Program Performance: Gender as Management Capital

Do men and women manage differently? Do their efforts have different impacts on public program performance? Building from a formal treatment of public management and performance, this study investigates how the interaction of gender and management strategies influences organizational performance. Focusing on several hundred public organizations and their top managers over a three‐year period, the analysis maps the gender question onto Mark Moore's distinction among managing upward toward political principals, downward toward organizational agents, and outward toward the networked environment. Findings indicate that women and men as top managers have different performance impacts, and these impacts vary by managerial function as well.     

Managerialism, Politics and Legal Bureaucratic Rationality in Immigration Policy

Against claims that public sector reforms have made the functions of managers similar to those in private firms, critics of the managerialist model point to constraints on public sector managers that make their decisions on resource allocation and policy development different from those affecting corporations. Through an examination of policy formulation, program management and decision-making in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, this article demonstrates that managerialist program planning, outcome orientation and performance measurement have been introduced, but that this has not precluded an expansion in non-market oriented routine, non-discretionary decision-making involving bureaucratic legal rationality within a legislative and regulatory framework. While some clients have been defined and assessed in terms of economic criteria, they access departmental processing not in terms of market signals, but according to their compliance with the Migration Act and Migration Regulations. Managerialism has not occurred at the expense of classical administrative practices, rather managerialist and legal bureaucratic forms have both grown and influenced political calculations on policy-making.     

Taken for Granted? Managing for Social Equity in Grant Programs

Managing for social equity performance has long been a goal without much guidance for public managers. We examine social equity performance in the context of indirect governance through the administration of grant programs and, more specifically, the matching of policy responses (grant funding) to social needs. Grant program managers must allocate funding to match needs while also ensuring accountability, but common administrative models that rely on competition can undermine social equity performance. We develop a unique framework to analyze the relative social equity performance of four models of grant administration in general. These models are defined by whether competitions or formulas are used to select grantees and to allocate funding. We test the implications of the framework in an analysis of funding distributions from the nonentitlement Community Development Block Grant program in four states. Our findings suggest that social equity in grant programs is better served when grantors do not rely solely on competitive grant contracting in the selection and distribution of grant funds, which is typical in grant administration. However, policy makers and managers can design institutional arrangements that utilize competition, but in a manner that does not create a bias against more socially equitable funding decisions.     

The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.     

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well‐known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data‐rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.     

Strengthening the Intergovernmental Grant System: Long-Term Lessons for the Federal–Local Relationship

This study investigates the longitudinal political and administrative problems associated with federal–local government relations. The findings demonstrate four primary challenges of the system of federal grants-in-aid that hinder the relationship of policy design at the federal level and policy implementation in local communities: the politics of decentralization, subnational capacity, program accountability and program adaptability. A case study of the Community Development Block Grant, as assessed by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and the General Accounting Office between 1974 and the present, is included to demonstrate the application of these problems within the system. Although the "evolution of devolution" can greatly benefit the recipients of public services at the local level, it often operates within an unorganized and ineffective system that public managers at all levels of government must continue to develop.     

Public Management and Educational Performance: The Impact of Managerial Networking

Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.     

PERFORMANCE PAY AS A COORDINATING MECHANISM IN THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC SERVICE

Abstract: Public sector management is in a state of flux. Pressures for greater efficiency and a stronger customer service orientation have led to changes to the structures and planning and reward systems of public sector organisations. In the milieu of reform, performance pay for managers has been given prominence in a recent critical report by the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration which recommends a return to a more standardised approach to management salaries in the APS. I argue instead that performance pay should be considered as a third-or fourth-order coordinating mechanism and linked to the strategies of individual departments in the APS. A policy for greater decentralisation of the design, implementation and management of performance pay schemes in APS organisations is presented.     

The Other Type of Performance Information: Nonroutine Feedback,Its Relevance and Use

The literature on performance information use explains how public managers deal with mainly quantitative data that are systematically collected and formally reported. This article argues that such a narrow understanding is incomplete, as it excludes all kinds of nonroutine performance information, including verbal, ad hoc, and qualitative feedback. To understand how responsive public managers are to performance feedback, alternative sources of performance information need to be taken into account. A literature review suggests considering two important sources of nonroutine feedback: organizational insiders and relevant external stakeholders. Using survey data from German local government, this article shows that public managers prefer to use nonroutine feedback over routine data from performance reports. Furthermore, a regression analysis indicates that different sources of performance information require different determinants to trigger their use. This finding is essential because it suggests that explanations of performance information use can covary with the information source studied.     

How Should We Estimate the Performance Effect of Management? Comparing Impacts of Public Managers’ and Frontline Employees’ Perceptions of Management

Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternative perspective on management can be provided by subordinates’ perceptions of what management is doing. Surveys of subordinates and of managers each pose potential advantages and potential disadvantages when it comes to measuring management, and each approach is likely to prove more fruitful for measuring certain management functions. Using a unique data set of parallel surveys on management with managers and their subordinates as respondents, we examine the differences and relationships between Danish school managers’ and teachers’ perceptions of management functions and the implications of such relationships for organizational performance. We find a surprisingly low correlation between manager and teacher responses regarding the same management functions. Teacher responses are better predictors of student performance for management aspects that are visible to and mediated by teachers. However, manager responses better predict performance for manager expectations that are less visible to employees.     

The Roles of Local Government Managers in Theory and Practice: A Centennial Perspective

The standard narrative to explain the evolution of roles filled by city managers suggests that managers originally served as administrative technicians who carried out the policy directives of city councils, but, over time, they became more involved in policy advice and community leadership. This article documents enduring involvement in policy and the recent expansion of community leadership, analyzing definitions of the manager's roles offered by practitioners and scholars since the beginning of the city manager profession 100 years ago. In addition, measurements of the manager's role performance at various points in time are examined, along with trends in the preparation of managers and the context in which they work. Ignoring the evidence that the policy role is integral to professional management can lead to unfounded questions about the legitimacy of city and county managers and impairs our understanding of the council‐manager form of government and political–administrative relations.     

Innovating Government-Wide Public Management Practices to Implement Development Policy: The Case of “Brazil in Action”

This article examines analytical and historical relationships between the topics of state capacity building and public management policy change. It does so by presenting an instrumental case study of Brazil in Action, a program that became the hallmark of the first presidential term of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The development of the program is explained on the basis of institutional processual meta-theories of policy and organizational change. The operation of the program is considered in terms of the clinical analysis of organizational practices. Implications for research on innovative administrative practice, public management policy change, and state capacity building are considered.     

Politics and Administration: A Trichotomy?

This article compares changes in the education and career paths of senior federal civil servants in Canada between 1967 and 1987. It shows that there has been a marked trend toward managers with less formal education than had previously been the case and also a shift toward managers with less experience in the policy areas within which they are responsible for providing policy advice and program management. This finding is consistent with Osbaldeston's study of Canadian deputy ministers, and with studies of bureaucratic elites in other Western democracies. In an increasingly complex environment, problems facing government decision-makers require high levels of technical expertise. This requirement is central to Weber's concept of bureaucracy, and it has been used as an explanation for the increasing prominence of bureaucrats in the policy-making process. In recent decades, however, bureaucratic reforms have emphasized the administrative functions of senior managers at the expense of their technical roles. In Canada, at least, this process appears to have gone so far that it may have seriously compromised the capacity of senior civil servants to give informed advice and to make knowledgeable decisions about the policies and programs of their departments.     

Does agency competition improve the quality of policy analysis? Evidence from OMB and CBO fiscal projections

Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that CBO has failed to enhance the quality of U.S. fiscal policy analysis on its own terms; nor has it spurred improvements in OMB's performance. Our empirical results indicate that the quality of OMB's fiscal projections has often deteriorated since the establishment of CBO as a rival bureau. We also show that both public and private information is being shared by these agencies to produce a similar caliber of task outputs. The broader implications of our study indicate that although politicians face incentives to employ agency competition in governmental settings, this type of bureaucratic strategy does not necessarily enhance the quality of administrative performance. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Understanding Shared Roles in Policy and Administration: An Empirical Study of Council‐Manager Relations

Recent literature in public administration emphasizes enhanced collaboration between elected and administrative officials. The complementarity view is presented as an alternative to the traditional politics–administration dichotomy. At the center of this new perspective lies the concept of shared roles between elected officials and public administrators with respect to policy making and administration. This article expands the emerging literature on role sharing by proposing and testing new variables to understand what enhances the policy‐making role of city managers and the administrative role of elected officials. Employing data collected from a nationwide survey of city managers and utilizing structural equation modeling methodology, this research finds that the council’s expectations and the city manager’s role conception significantly influence the city manager’s involvement in policy making, while the context of policy making, the city manager’s support, and the council’s access to resources affect elected officials’ involvement in administration. This article aims to make a cumulative contribution to the literature on role sharing.     

政府绩效视角下的行政管理体制改革战略反思——基于地方政府公务员的感知调查

改革开放以来,我国行政管理体制改革一直坚持以组织结构调整为主的模式.对于这一模式的影响,尤其对地方政府的影响,一直缺少科学层面的检验和理论层面的反思.本文选取政府绩效作为标杆,利用地方政府公务员的问卷调查数据,探索政府部门间关系和部门管理制度建设影响部门绩效的路径和程度,使用结构方程模型实证检验了行政管理体制改革战略在地方层面的有效性.结果表明,部门间关系作为政府结构的核心特征对于政府绩效并没有直接的影响作用,其影响作用是通过部门制度建设和部门文化间接发挥的;部门制度建设对政府绩效的整体影响要大于部门间关系.因此,在今后的改革中应该给予管理制度层面的改革更多的重视,通过局部的、具体制度的改革为整体的、基本制度的变革创造条件.同时,还应在改革过程中维护政府组织文化的凝聚力和激励性.     

公共管理:社会治理中的一场革命(下)

五、公共管理是一种职业活动 人的职业活动,以及在职业活动中生成的特殊的社会关系,来自于社会生活和社会生产不同领域的分离.在人类社会的早期,社会生产和生活不同领域的分离是以分工的形式出现的,主要是由于社会生产活动的分化造成了职业活动的专门化.到了晚近,职业活动已经不限于生产领域,而是扩大到了生产领域之外的许多领域,几乎遍及社会生产和生活的绝大部分领域.人们在职业活动方面的区别,也不再仅限于活动意义上的"分工",而是职业活动主体意义上的"分群".社会生产的领域有分化、重组、融合的双向运动趋势,而社会生活领域则更多地表现为领域分离的单向运动.