The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 and the George W. Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) established new routines that were intended to foster performance management practices. Using data from two surveys, the authors find that the involvement of agency employees in GPRA processes and PART reviews generally had little direct effect on performance information use once other factors are accounted for. The main exception is that managerial involvement in GPRA processes and PART reviews is associated with the use of performance data to refine measures and goals. This reflects the limits of government‐wide reform efforts that depend on difficult‐to‐observe bureaucratic behavior. The authors also find that a series of organizational factors—leadership commitment to results, learning routines led by supervisors, the motivational nature of the task, and the ability to link measures to actions—are positive predictors of performance information use.

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Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. Th is "big data" revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well-known problems with public sector performance management-particularly the problem of goal displacement-the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. Th e latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. Th e author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data-rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.

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