THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RETRACTED: STRENGTHENING THE LINK BETWEEN PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND DECISION MAKING

Retraction: The following article from Public Administration, ‘Strengthening the link between performance measurement and decision making’, by Jeannette Taylor, published online on 18 December 2009 in Wiley Online Library ( www.wileyonlinelibrary.com ) and in Volume 89:3, September 2011, pp. 860–878 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1467‐9299.2009.01802.x), has been retracted by agreement between the author, the journal Editor in Chief, Arjen Boin, and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to a production error, as a duplicate version of the article, entitled ‘Strengthening the link between performance measurement and decision making’ by the same author (DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2009.01788.x ) was previously published in volume 87:4 of the same journal. The publishers apologise to the author and to our readers for this error. REFERENCE Taylor, J. (2011), Strengthening the Link Between Performance Measurement and Decision Making. Public Administration, 89: 860–878. doi: 10.1111/j.1467‐9299.2009.01802 Many public agencies now face dual pressures to meet external accountability demands on one hand, and improve their internal performance on the other. This begs the question whether the demands that are made on public agencies to externally report on their performance have a limited or wide ranging impact on the utilization of performance indicators (PIs) for internal improvements. This article addresses this question via a small group of public agencies and public accountability authorities in Australia. It also examines the main factors that affect the use of PIs for decision making. The evidence suggests that the agencies use PIs more for meeting external reporting requirements than for achieving internal improvements. Various constraints on the use of PIs were identified, mainly technical problems, and to a lesser extent, political and organizational issues.     

A Province in Motion

<正>Northeast Hebei’s Bohai Sea economic zone is set to drive growth and provide another link between China and the rest of the world From technical experts and foreign investors to tourists, Hebei Provinceis trying to draw in a diverse crowd to fuel its development, encourage     

The Single‐Party Dictator's Dilemma: Information in Elections without Opposition

The literature on authoritarian institutions points to nationwide elections as a mechanism for learning about the preferences of citizens. In using elections in this way, however, authoritarians face a trade‐off between gathering reliable information and guaranteeing electoral victory. In this article, we explore how single‐party regimes manage this trade‐off and the particular types of information available to them. Using candidate‐level data from Vietnam, we demonstrate that single‐party regimes, in particular, forsake information on overall regime support and strength of opposition in favor of information on the popularity of local notables and the compliance of local officials with central mandates. In addition, we show that ex ante electioneering is less risky than ex post fraud at achieving these goals.     

PRIME MINISTERIAL RHETORIC AND RECESSION POLITICS: MEANING MAKING IN ECONOMIC CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Triggered by the collapse of the US mortgage market, the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–08 hit most of the Western world hard and fast, presenting governments and citizens with a set of stark, undeniable and immediate realities. This article examines the attempts of three prime ministers “Gordon Brown in the UK, Brian Cowen in Ireland and Kevin Rudd in Australia to meet the key leadership challenge set up by the GFC: to publicly assess, explain and account for the GFC and the accompanying economic turbulence and uncertainty as financial markets went from boom to bust. By focussing on meaning making we examine how the leaders responded to the public expectation to explain: How bad is the situation? How did it occur? Who or what is to be held responsible? What needs to be done to cope with it? Using both qualitative and quantitative methods we compare the rhetorical impacts of these leaders.     

Protection Elsewhere/Nowhere

The Australian Government takes the position that it does notowe protection obligations to an asylum seeker who could havesought protection elsewhere. In taking this position it is purportingto invoke the so-called ‘safe third country’ principlewhich has developed out of international practice. This articleexamines Australia's purported applications of the ‘safethird country’ principle and concludes that in some instancesthey represent an attempt to extend that principle beyond whatthe international community presently considers acceptable orever should consider acceptable.