Performance in Public Organizations: Clarifying the Conceptual Space

Performance in public organizations is a key concept that requires clarification. Based on a conceptual review of research published in 10 public administration journals, this article proposes six distinctions to describe the systematic differences in performance criteria: From which stakeholder's perspective is performance being assessed? Are the criteria formal or informal? Are the criteria subjective? Which process focus and product focus do they have, if any? What is the unit of analysis? Based on these distinctions, the performance criteria of existing studies used in an empirical review of management and performance are classified. The results illustrate how a systematization of the conceptual space of performance in public organizations can help researchers select what to study and what to leave out with greater accuracy while also bringing greater clarity to public debates about performance.     

A Danish killer amendment—when judicial review was banned from the 1849 Constitution

In real political life “killer amendments” are very rare. William H. Riker was the first political scientist to draw systematic attention to this special “heresthetic” phenomenon, but he was himself only able to identify a handful of successful “killer amendments”. Subsequent systematic empirical research has brought a few more to attention. In this article what may be the first successful example from outside the US context is described. It took place, when the Danish Constituent Assembly in 1849 discussed, if a proper judicial review procedure should be institutionalized in the Danish Constitution. The motion was defeated by means of what looks like a nicely orchestrated “killer amendment”.     

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Fiscal Outcomes?

Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts – elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five‐year perspective, although the pre‐reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re‐establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi‐experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference‐in‐Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003–11.     

Differences and Changes in Danish Party Organisations: Central Party Organisation versus Parliamentary Party Group Power

The subject of this article is the relationship between the central party organisation and the parliamentary party group. The article investigates whether Danish political parties are changing into parties dominated by their parliamentary party groups, as has been hypothesised. In contrast to most of the literature on party change, which is based on ideas of convergence caused by external changes, this article argues that party organisation is basically a party decision and therefore influenced by party preferences and characteristics. The analyses are based on data from the statutes of 16 Danish parties in over 50 years. One noteworthy finding is that Danish parties do not converge. Party ideology proves to be very important for the power structure of a party. Even though political parties are exposed to changing political circumstances they still organise according to their basic ideas about democracy and representation.     

The puzzle of Dutch welfare state retrenchment

In the literature on welfare state retrenchment and in the general emphasis on the resilience of welfare states, the Dutch case appears puzzling by virtue of the fact that significant retrenchments have actually taken place in the Netherlands. It appears even more puzzling considering that the arguments in this literature as to the difficulties in welfare state retrenchments apply very well to this case, whereas the arguments as to why after all welfare state retrenchments are possible do not apply particularly well. This article argues that the explanation for the Dutch puzzle should be found in Dutch politics. Due to the power of the CDA as a pivotal centre party, the PvdA was at an early stage forced to accept welfare state retrenchment. A party consensus thus emerged allowing Dutch governments to define the issue of welfare state retrenchment as a matter of economic necessity.     

The 2005 Danish general election: A phase of consolidation

On 18 January 2005, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen called for a general election to be held on 8 February 2005, nine months before the deadline for the next election. Political themes are usually cited when calling Danish elections, but this time the calendar was used as an excuse: because of major reforms to the municipal structure, a significant amount of legislation had to be negotiated and settled in the spring, and it was unclear whether this could be done by June, thereby hindering an election in late spring; and an election in September could possibly overshadow the important elections to the new municipal councils (created as a result of the reform) in November. Nevertheless, favourable opinion polls undoubtedly also played a major role when the Prime Minister asked the Danes to renew and extend the mandate of his Liberal–Conservative (aka Venstre–Conservative) coalition government.     

State,bureaucracy and change in India

The article discusses the nature of the Indian state and of the Indian bureaucracy. During the 1980s, it was widely believed that the Indian bureaucracy constituted a dominant class and that this dominance is the root cause of economic stagnation. When confronted with empirical evidence, this assertion seems less convincing. The complex picture that emerges of the Indian state does not totally contradict the dominant view. This complexity points to a need for a more elaborated theoretical understanding of the role of the state and of the public bureaucracy. The article concludes by sketching the outlines of such a possible revised theoretical framework.     

Campaigns Matter: How Voters Become Knowledgeable and Efficacious During Election Campaigns

Election campaigns are more than simple competitions for votes; they also represent an opportunity for voters to become politically knowledgeable and engaged. Using a large-scale Web panel (N ≈ 5,000), we track the development of political knowledge, internal efficacy, and external efficacy among voters during the 2011 Danish parliamentary election campaign. Over the course of the campaign, the electorate’s political knowledge increases, and these gains are found across genders, generations, and educational groups, narrowing the knowledge gap within the electorate. Furthermore, internal and external efficacy increase over the course of the campaign, with gains found across different demographic groups, particularly narrowing the gaps in internal efficacy. The news media play a crucial role, as increased knowledge and efficacy are partly driven by media use, although tabloids actually decrease external efficacy. The findings suggest that positive campaign effects are universal across various media and party systems.