Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Public sector reforms generally, and initiatives aimed at improving government performance in particular, are presented by reformers as politically neutral tools. A variety of approaches have critiqued such claims. This paper looks at the relationship between agency ideology and how reforms are implemented. We test if ideological divergence between the President implementing the reform and individual agencies affects how such reforms are used by federal managers.

Previous work has studied this question by examining an executive-branch reform, the Program Assessment Rating Tool, adopted during the George W. Bush administration. This work found that PART tended to facilitate greater attention to organizational performance only within federal agencies classified as conservative by political scientists (Lavertu and Moynihan 2013). Liberal agencies tended to view the reform of a conservative president with greater suspicion, and were less likely to commit time and effort to PART.

We examine if ideological divergence matters for the success of other statutory performance management reforms, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, and the GPRA Modernization Act (GPRAMA) of 2010. Our analysis uses four rounds of Government Accountability Office federal survey data from 2000, 2007, 2013 and 2016/17, which allows us to run a pooled cross-sectional model with a consistent set of measures, but with variation on which reform was in place (GPRA in 2000, PART in 2007, and GPRAMA in 2013 and 2016/17), and the nature of the ideological divergence between Presidents and agencies. The variation allows us to test if ideological divergence between Presidents and agencies consistently results in performance management reforms being used more in agencies that align with the President or not.

Each reform was implemented by the President’s Office of Management and Budget, but GPRA and GPRAMA, unlike PART, were statutory reforms, and enjoyed more bipartisan support. Under such conditions, it becomes more likely that these reforms were less likely to be viewed as a tool of the President who was tasked with implementing them. There are important practical implications to the research: if performance reforms are always viewed as partisan tools used by the President of the day, this significantly limits the utility of these reforms, since some set of public officials will always resist using such reforms depending on who occupies the White House. If, on the other hand, some reforms are less likely to be experienced as a partisan tool, they are more likely to be used. Analyzing three separate reforms across multiple administrations provides stronger evidence of how partisan ideology interacts with public management reforms, and can provide clues as to which type of reforms might be more widely accepted.

Lavertu, Stéphane, and Donald P. Moynihan. "Agency political ideology and reform implementation: Performance management in the Bush administration." Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 23, no. 3 (2012): 521-549.