Performance evaluation, public management improvement and democratic accountability

Abstract

The results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, challenging this view, some authors claim that results-based management reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy. There is however, limited empirical evidence of this relationship. This article uses some of the findings from a comparative study of public management evaluation systems in four Latin American countries to illuminate this relationship in practice. We discuss the fact that, in two of the four countries surveyed, the design features of the new systems were based on the explicit search for increased political accountability and the deepening of democracy. We also discuss the possible causes for the finding that the outcome and performance information generated is not being applied for decision-making purposes yet, as expected.

Democracy, governmentality and transparency: participatory budgeting in action

“…This tension has often been depicted as a preoccupation with efficiency and results-oriented management which undermines democratic accountability (Ribot et al, 2008) and where recasting the citizen as a consumer is highly problematic (Box et al, 2001). Nevertheless, there are proponents of the new managerialism in local government who suggest that the results-oriented reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy (Ospina et al, 2004).…”

Performance Management of IT in Public Administrations: A Literature Review on Driving Forces, Barriers and Influencing Factors

“…As a consequence, the information which can be derived from the KPIs is not used by them, i.e. no control impulses are derived from IT PM and there is no strategic IT PM [7,15,16,25,27,30,[41][42][43]. As public IT managers do not know the benefits which PM can have for them, they do not see any additional value, but only a greater bureaucratic effort.…”

In Search of Public Accountability: The ‘Wenling Model’ in China

“…Chile and Uruguay have organised their public sectors' performance evaluations around the budgeting cycle and within the realm of budgetary allocation, thereby focusing on managerial reinvigoration. Conversely, the performance evaluations in Colombia and Costa Rica have prioritised strategic planning and decision making at the policy or organisational level, in ways guided by the incumbent political leaders' electoral commitments, according to which the citizenry hold public servants accountable (Ospina, Grau and Zaltsman 2004:234–242). Therefore, as the democratic initiatives in China sprout in their incipient stage amidst an entrenched dominance of managerial accountability, China's case stands, in the broader terms of NPM, somewhere between the two contrasting groups of Latin American cases.…”