Does Performance Budgeting Work? An Examination of the Office of Management and Budget’s PART Scores

In this paper, the authors use the Bush administration's management grades from the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to evaluate performance budgeting in the federal government—in particular, the role of merit and political considerations in formulating recommendations for 234 programs in the president's fiscal year 2004 budget. PART scores and political support were found to influence budget choices in expected ways, and the impact of management scores on budget decisions diminished as the political component was taken into account. The Bush administration's management scores were positively correlated with proposed budgets for programs housed in traditionally Democratic departments but not in other departments. The federal government's most ambitious effort to use performance budgeting to date shows both the promise and the problems of this endeavor.     

Incrementalism before the Storm: Network Performance for the Evacuation of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of preparedness in disaster management networks covering the New Orleans area. This paper focuses on the operation of networks in preparing to evacuate residents in advance of a major disaster. There are two cases: the relatively successful evacuation of residents who left by private conveyance and the widely publicized failure to provide for those who could not or would not leave on their own. We trace the actions and inactions of various players to reach conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of networks in the special circumstances of disaster preparation.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

Dead Heat: The 2006 Public Choice Society Election

In 2006, the Public Choice Society chose a new president using approval voting. There were five candidates, and the election was extremely close. We indicate the sources of support of the different candidates, based in part on spectral analysis, by voters who cast between one and five votes. Using preference information that was also gathered, we show that two candidates different from the approval voting winner, including the apparent Condorcet winner, might have won under different voting systems. Because most voters did not indicate their complete preference rankings, however, these differences are hardly robust, especially since the outcome was essentially a dead heat.