Panel:
Exploring Connections between Performance Reforms and Politics
(Public and Non-Profit Management and Finance)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
This panel considers the ways in which public sector reforms, specifically reforms that seek to improve public-sector performance, interact with politics. The most obvious relationship is that performance reforms are adopted by politicians, but we explore a variety of other, more nuanced relationships. The range of these approaches range from how political principals seek to control reforms to improve outcomes (FitzGerald et al.) or to improve their career prospects (Leng), to how bureaucratic agents respond to the political ideology of principals (Kroll and Moynihan), to how performance systems trigger biased evaluations (Porumbescu, Piotrowski and Mabillard).
The consistent thread throughout the panel is the idea that performance reforms are not politically neutral. The papers demonstrate that the implementation of such systems is closely tied to the goals of political principals, which can align with citizen goals or be more ideological, or self-interested. How performance data is consumed also interacts with politics, with the potential to trigger underlying biases across toward groups that weakens their standing in public settings. The panel combines research from the US, the UK, and China, with a diverse group of faculty ranging from post-docs to full professors, employing a range of methodological techniques.
How do political principals maintain control in contracted-out performance reforms? FitzGerald examine how political principals in the UK have wrestled with controlling a novel performance reform – Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) – in the absence of the traditional democratic controls they are able to exert in bureaucratic hierarchies. While SIBs have enormous appeal, they pose new challenges of how to deal with gaming.
Do performance targets causing gaming by politicians to further their career?Leng shows that ambiguous policy goals caused goal displacement in China, as ambitious regional Chinese politicians favored more visible policy outcomes while neglecting less visible but equally important goals. She finds that national officials, rather than tamping down on this problem, largely restructured the performance system to solidify the measures created at lower levels. In this way, goal displacement became formalized.
How does ideological distance matter to performance management? Kroll and Moynihan examine how much the success of performance management reforms depends upon ideological distance between the political principal and the agencies implementing the reform. Ideological alignment is an important concept in understanding bureaucratic politics, but rarely applied to public sector reform. While previous research has shown that reforms closely identified with a conservative President struggled in liberal agencies, they suggest that bipartisan statutory reforms may fare better regardless of which President is in place.
Does performance information trigger racial biases? Porumbescu, Piotrowski and Mabillarduse an experimental design to show that when people are given negative performance data they tend to be more critical of the manager in charge of a service if told the manager is black rather than white. The implication is that performance data can enhance out-group blame attribution in political systems.
