The relevance and reliability of performance information for accountability: A survey experiment exploring citizens' views

This study explores the impact of the configuration of performance information on citizens' perceptions regarding the impact of the information on their lives and the reliability they assign to it. We conducted a survey experiment among a representative sample of the Israeli population. The treatment included the object being measured, the identity of those who manage the performance management mechanism, and the trend of the results. We also compared the education and police sectors. Our findings indicate that, overall, citizens feel that performance information has only a low-to-medium effect on their lives, and assign a similar level of reliability to that information. The configuration of performance information helps explain this perceived impact only to a limited extent. These findings question the usefulness of performance reporting mechanisms as a major tool for strengthening accountability and raise serious doubts about the possible ways to improve these mechanisms and make them more effective.     

Patronage,politics and performance: radio call-in programmes and the myth of accountability

The role of media in promoting political accountability and citizen participation is a central issue in governance debates. Drawing on research into the interactions between radio station owners, journalists, audiences and public authorities during Somali radio call-in programmes we argue that these programmes do not simply offer a new platform for citizens to challenge those who are governing but that they are also spaces where existing power structures reproduce themselves in new forms. We identify the ways the programmes are structured and the different motivations the audience has for participation. Three types of programmes are identified and their relationships with patronage, politics, and performance are examined. Rather than focusing on normative assumptions about the media as a tool of accountability, the article emphasises the importance of understanding radio programmes in their social and political environment, including the overlapping relationships between on-air and off-air networks.     

A Prehistory of the Best Value Regime

Best Value was one of the central planks of New Labour's modernisation agenda for local government. This article uncovers the origins of the regime by unpicking the activities of two working groups responsible for its design. Licking its wounds in the aftermath of the 1987 General Election the Labour Party's leadership had come to see the party's record in local government as a source of increasing embarrassment. A series of policy initiatives, first emerging from the party's policy review, later given the Best Value tag, were intended to neutralise producer interests and improve the party's reputation for governing competence.     

Best Value and the Market Orientation of UK Recreation Centres

This paper explores the similarities between the Best Value initiative and the well-established market orientation construct. It shows that many of the benefits that Best Value could bring to local authority recreation centres could have been achieved more easily by implementing the market orientation philosophy. A study of 67 recreation centres suggests that although market orientation will increase under Best Value, the benefits from this might be somewhat illusory and represent poor value for the administrative and operational burdens entailed.     

The Best Laid Plans: The Impact of Informal Rules on Formal Institutions in Transitional Regimes

How do informal institutions influence the formation and function of formal institutions? Existing typologies focus on the interaction of informal institutions with an established framework of formal rules that is taken for granted. In transitional settings, such typologies are less helpful, since many formal institutions are in a state of flux. Instead, using examples drawn from post-communist state development, I argue that informal institutions can replace, undermine, and reinforce formal institutions irrespective of the latter’s strength, and that the elite competition generated by informal rules further influences which of these interactions dominate the development of the institutional framework. In transitional settings, the emergence and effectiveness of many formal institutions is endogenous to the informal institutions themselves.     

Reforms to enhance accountability and citizen involvement: a case study of the hong kong hospital authority

The article begins by examining current issues in thinking about accountability, citizen involvement and empowerment. The discussion then moves to the particular context of Hong Kong. Recent reforms to public hospital services are reviewed in the light of the territory's traditional values of paternalistic bureaucracy and minimal citizen involvement. It is shown that despite good intentions to enhance public accountability and cgitizen involvement, in practice there has been little substantive change in the distribution of power between the ruling elite, health care professionals, and the actual service users. Whilst more information about service performance may now be available, opportunities for citizen involvement and representation continue to be carefully managed by the administration. The net result is that only a very few members of the lay public have been appointed to the new bodies that are now responsible for the governance of the public hospitals. Nearly all of those appointed to such bodies are unrepresentative of the normal service users being drawn, instead, from members of the mostly non-public hospital users - namely Hong Kong's very wealthy professional and business elites. For most of the general public, therefore, the reforms have been less about empowerment and involvement and more about informing them of the changes that have been introduced or of educating them so that abuses of the system can be reduced, or their help enlisted in locally organized fund-raising functions. The article concludes that however well-meaning the reformers might have been in terms of endeavouring to enhance accountability and citizen involvement, the impact of such efforts are likely to be seriously limited whenever underlying administrative or social values conflict with those that ostensibly guide the reforms.     

The Applicability of Best Value in the Nigerian Public Sector

We examine the applicability of Best Value practices in the Nigerian public sector and present a Best Value Model for Nigeria. We find the literature does not extend to the Nigerian context. We make contributions towards understanding stakeholder perceptions of public service delivery best practice. We show Best Value as a significant initiative for improving public service delivery. The mixed methods survey reveals Nigerian Best Value initiatives do not exist significantly, but are applicable. Outcomes are exploration of a new area for Best Value application, incorporation of implementation issues into the model and the seven-stage process for its implementation.     

Central banks under stress: Reputation,accountability and regulatory coherence

This symposium homes in on an area of public administration that has been through a period of significant change in the last ten years. Since the global financial crisis, central banks have expanded their operations in financial markets, buying up vast quantities of assets as part of expansive monetary policy strategies. They have also played a leading role in the reform of financial regulation and have been entrusted with enhanced authority to supervise financial institutions. This activity has taken place amid heightened political contestation, with central banks increasingly viewed as the quintessence of a technocratic mode of governance that eschews traditional democratic control. The purpose of this symposium is to consider how central banks’ reputation, accountability and regulatory roles have changed since the financial crisis, and what those changes tell us about the balance of power between independent regulatory agencies and elected policy‐makers.     

A Realist Evaluation Approach to Understanding the Best Value Review Process

This article evaluates a sample of ten Best Value reviews (BVRs) using realist evaluation techniques. The underlying logic of the BVR process is taken from a reconstruction of the relationship between the review context, the mechanisms used in undertaking the review and outcomes achieved. This 'abstract configuration' is then used to map the actual processes driving the sample BVRs (the 'focused configurations') and variances explored. These variances suggest difficulties in diagnosing the root causes of service problems and selecting appropriate resolution mechanisms. Stakeholder pressure appears to be crucial in determining the focused configurations. The realist method enables the exploration of the precise intent of stakeholders. This capacity demonstrates the efficacy of a theory-based approach to understanding Best Value.     

Outcome assessment: a tool for enhancing quality,relevance and accountability

The issue of outcome assessment is receiving increased attention in the area of higher education, generally, and in the fields of public and business administration, more specifically. A variety of methodologies are available for such assessments. This article argues that survey methodology is the most appropriate approach and presents a model for designing survey-based outcome assessments. In addition, an example of the application of survey methods for outcome assessment of a unique graduate level management education program is presented.     

Institutional isomorphism,negativity bias and performance information use by politicians: A survey experiment

New Public Management popularized performance measurement in public organizations. Underlying performance measurement's popularity is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision-making, thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite its popularity, performance measurement is criticized. In part, this criticism results from the limited knowledge of the conditions under which PI is purposefully used by politicians. We conducted a survey experiment based on real PI with 1,240 politicians. We hypothesized that PI has a positive impact on performance information use (PIU) when PI is benchmarked with coercive, mimetic or normative pressures. Moreover, due to negativity bias we expected this positive impact to be stronger when PI signals low performance. We found that normative pressures had a positive impact on actual PIU while coercive pressures positively affected intended PIU. Negativity bias is only relevant when linked to coercive pressures and intended PIU for analysing the organization's finances.     

Reshaping Employment Relations in the UK Voluntary Sector: an Exploratory Study into the Impact of Best Value

This paper provides exploratory insights into the impact of the UK government's Best Value policy on employment policies in voluntary organisations. Best Value is one of a number of institutional pressures on HR policies within the sector: many of which have positive implications for the conduct of HR and delivering care. However, the data also reveal tensions in this institutional environment with regard to meeting demands of twenty-four hour care and family-friendly policies for the workforce. Moreover, continuation of aspects of the New Public Management agenda within Best Value means that pressure on pay and conditions in the sector persist, raising concerns regarding worker morale and quality of care.     

Accounts and accountability: Theoretical implications of the right-to-information movement in India

The work of a small and unusual activist group in the north Indian state of Rajasthan has raised a series of practical and theoretical issues concerning the best means for combating specific instances of corruption, and for promoting accountability more generally. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)-literally-:Workers' and Farmers' Power Organisation-has waged a campaign to secure the right of ordinary people to gain access to information held by government officials. In the process of experimenting with methods of compiling, sharing and verifying expenditure data at very local levels-thus far, in the absence of a statutory entitlement to such informationthe MKSS has developed a radical interpretation of the notion that citizens have a right both to know how they are governed and to participate actively in the process of auditing their representatives. This article examines the process by which this campaign emerged and the means by which it pursues its goals. It then analyses the implications of the MKSS experience, and the larger movement it has spawned, for contemporary debates in three areas: human rights, participatory development and, of course, anti-corruption.     

Accounting and accountability: bottom lines and basic mistakes

Political leaders in the United States and Great Britain over the past several decades have been denigrating the performance of public managers and focusing the reform agenda on emulating the efficiency and cost-savings techniques of business. Recently, however, the English have been taking up another set of problems--those flowing from lack of clarity as to the proper relationship between politics and administration. This article will argue that it is now time for Americans to follow suit and to put the politics-administration relationship at the forefront of the public administration agenda in order to promote a more ethical, more effective, and more attractive public service profession.     

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: Procedural mechanisms of accountability,transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi‐level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi‐level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multi‐level governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria—accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness—and points towards substantive institutional reforms.