Levels of Value Integration in Federal Agencies' Mission and Value Statements: Is Open Government a Performance Target of U.S. Federal Agencies?

Abstract

The Barack Obama administration advanced open government initiatives to make federal administration more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Yet a question remains whether federal administrators took notice. This article examines changes in the extent to which U.S. federal agencies have integrated the three core principles of open government-transparency, public participation, and collaboration-into their performance planning. By analyzing 337 annual performance plans of 24 major federal agencies from fiscal years 2001 to 2016, the authors found that, overall, the level of integration of open government into performance planning has been trending higher since the early 2000s. During the Obama presidency, integration initially rose sharply but later declined. Findings also show that agencies' stated core values regarding open government are not consistently integrated into their performance plans. The implications of these findings for incorporating democratic-constitutional values into holistic performance management are considered. Evidence for Practice • U.S. federal agencies can, and do, incorporate democratic-constitutional values into their performance management schemes. • Agencies with open government values explicitly listed in their value statements are no more likely than other agencies to include open government in their performance plans. In other words, agencies' stated core values are not consistently integrated into their performance plans. • The declining level of integration of open government activities into performance planning may result in less attention, reduced investment of resources, and weaker efforts by federal agencies to foster more transparent, participatory, and collaborative governance. • It is important for agencies to incorporate democratic-constitutional values (which are not central to agency mission but are important governmental attributes in their own right) into performance planning. Models such as the GPRA Modernization Act may offer a starting point for balanced approaches.

Government Social Media Engagement Strategies and Public Roles

“…For example, Hand and Ching (2011) reported this to be the case with municipalities in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Because of the widespread lack of dialogue (see their survey of U.S. local government managers), Reddick and Norris (2013) went as far as to re-label such one-way practices as Government 1.5, and to their point, scholarship continues to demonstrate that participation is neither frequently realized in practice (Brainard & Edlins, 2015;Mossberger et al, 2013;Zavattaro & Brainard, 2019) nor strongly imbued as a value within the organizations charged with pursuing it (Piotrowski et al, 2018).…”

Data sharing in small and medium US cities: The role of community characteristics

“…Open data portals and Freedom of Information (FOI) laws encourage government agencies to provide data publicly or upon request (Attard et al 2015;Grimmelikhuijsen and Feeney 2016;Worthy et al 2017). Crowdsourcing campaigns engage communities in sharing data with government (Piotrowski et al 2018) while government-to-government information systems enable data sharing across agencies (Dawes 1996;Gil-Garcia and Sayogo 2016). We focus on frequency of data sharing between a city department and external stakeholders, including businesses and nonprofit organizations (Weitzman et al 2006;Welch et al 2016).…”

“…Internal factors, such as management, leadership, organizational structure, culture and resources, are often associated with data sharing (Dawes 1996;Gil-Garcia and Sayogo 2016;Grimmelikhuijsen and Feeney 2016;Piotrowski et al 2018). Public organizations with more technical resources (Gil-Garcia and Sayogo 2016;Welch et al 2016), low centralization and bureaucratization (Fountain 2007;Yang and Maxwell 2011), and more connected public employees (Kim and Lee 2006) are more likely to share data.…”

“…Yet residents' political preferences are not significantly related to a city department's decision to provide data to local stakeholders. This lack of findings might suggest that openness has become a nonpartisan value among public managers in response to several policies and initiatives launched at the national level (Piotrowski et al 2018).…”

A Fistful of Data: Unpacking the Performance Predicament

“…Indeed, the public interest often emphasizes the soft side of performance where intangible goals (such as transparency, due process, social equity, which Piotrowski and Rosenbloom [] characterize as democratic constitutional values) serve a higher purpose than any objective metric. Soft goals are embedded in public organization missions and mandated by law—disregarding them is potentially counterproductive (as illustrated by Piotrowski et al [] in this issue) and criminal. Thus, public organizations are often tasked with the pursuit of multiple goals, a difficult and potentially unproductive effort if not handled strategically, as Carrigan () explains.…”