Never Change a Winning Policy? Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms

Abstract

Despite the increasing stress on performance in public sector organizations, there is still little empirical evidence on whether—and if so, how—politicians respond to performance information. This article addresses this research gap by linking registry statistics on school performance in Norway's 428 municipalities with data from an information experiment embedded in a survey of local politicians. Findings show that school performance bears only a weak relationship to politicians' preferences for resource‐related reforms, but it strongly affects preferences for governance‐related reforms, indicating the importance of accounting for heterogeneity across alternative types of (school) reforms. Moreover, local politicians are, on average, well informed about school performance. This reflects the force of local inhabitants' high information level on politicians' accountability.

Do Politicians See Eye to Eye? The Relationship between Political Group Characteristics, Perceived Strategic Plan Quality, and Strategic Consensus in Local Governing Majorities

“…The results indicate that these “traditional” operationalizations of group characteristics brought forward by upper echelons theory have little impact on the degree of strategic consensus, while measures “tailored” to the idiosyncrasies of the analyzed setting (i.e., government power and political diversity) are important predictors of strategic consensus and PSPQ. These findings support the growing body of research indicating that the political and ideological forces steering the behavior of politicians are not eliminated during these presumed rational decision‐making processes and need to be taken into account (e.g., Geys and Sørensen ; Nielsen and Moynihan ). Does this mean that rational planning practices and the characteristics of politicized public settings are irreconcilable?…”

Behavioral Public Administration ad fontes: A Synthesis of Research on Bounded Rationality, Cognitive Biases, and Nudging in Public Organizations

“…A robust discussion has begun on decision‐making biases in public management, administration, and policy. Most scholars have investigated how citizens make informed assessments of government policies (see, e.g., Andersen and Hjortskov ; Geys and Sørensen ; Grosso, Charbonneau, and Van Ryzin ; Jilke, Van Ryzin, and Van de Walle ; Marvel ; Olsen ). Fewer studies, however, have reviewed the decision processes of public managers (e.g., Bellé, Cantarelli, and Belardinelli ) and policy makers (e.g., Moynihan and Lavertu ).…”

Identity, threat aversion, and civil servants' policy preferences: Evidence from the European Parliament

“…We contribute to this literature by arguing that identification impacts individuals' policy preferences by shifting the relative focus on the advantages and disadvantages of available policy options. We thereby likewise contribute to the integration of behavioural elements into the analysis of policy-making, which has recently received increased attention (James 2011;Andersen and Moynihan 2016;Riccucci et al 2016;Geys and Sørensen 2017;Grimmelikhuijsen et al 2017;Olsen 2017).…”

“…Our explicit focus on the preferences of public officials thus helps to develop a clearer picture of the entire European legislative process. Finally, behavioural approaches and experimental methods have in recent years become more prominent in the political sciences (James 2011;James and Moseley 2014;Blom-Hansen et al 2015;Kuehnhanss et al 2015;Nielsen and Baekgaard 2015;George et al 2016;Baekgaard et al 2017), and are increasingly being introduced to the study of public administrations (Andersen and Hjortskov 2016;Andersen and Moynihan 2016;Jilke et al 2016;Geys and Sørensen 2017;Grimmelijkhuisen et al 2017). However, such studies have thus far only considered national or sub-national levels of government, and fail to engage with the supranational level.…”