Measuring How Administration Shapes Citizenship: A Policy Feedback Perspective on Performance Management

Abstract

Governments increasingly require administrators to develop outcome measurements that reflect a program's impact on society. But standard approaches to performance measurement have neglected the impact on citizenship outcomes. Citizenship outcomes are individual civic capacities and dispositions and social bonds of civic reciprocity and trust. The concept is adapted from the growing policy feedback literature in political science, which offers strong empirical evidence that certain policies have measurable effects on citizenship outcomes such as political participation, social capital, a sense of civic belonging and self-worth as a citizen. Using the Program Assessment Rating Tool as an example, we demonstrate the failure of performance assessments to consider the civic implications of public policies. We argue that performance management systems should focus on citizenship outcomes, and offer a series of suggestions on how to measure such outcomes.3

Performance Management in Local Government: The Application of System Dynamics to Promote Data Use

“…In other words, our goal is to show how a systems approach can help public officials move from performance adoption to performance implementation. However, a major outcome of our research is that the practice of performance management must take into account citizenship outcomes as described by Wichowsky and Moynihan (2008) before certain policy decisions can be made on the grounds of service efficiency and effectiveness. We conclude this article by identifying several possibilities of how system dynamics can be used to improve the quality of performance management in local government and the aptitude of policy makers to link outputs with outcomes.…”

Policymaking by Other Means

“…Historically, federal quality control guidelines offered states much stronger incentives to avoid overpayment rather than to enroll eligible participants (Hanratty, 2006). Such a tendency remains in contemporary performance evaluations of welfare programs, where reducing fraud is often an important goal, but beneficiary take-up is neglected (Wichowsky and Moynihan, 2008). In the following section, we describe our data and methodology for documenting variation in states' administrative burdens and for examining their political roots.…”

Implementation and effects of user participation in playground management: a comparative study of two Swedish municipalities

“…NPM consists of a cluster of ideas borrowed from the private sector on how to manage organisations (Power, 1997). One of the most common ideas is to view citizens and other users of local government services as customers (Maddock, 2002;Walker and Boyne, 2006;Wichowsky and Moynihan, 2008). One effect of this change is decentralisation of responsibility in the local government.…”