Public Administration and Issues Relating to Government
Performance
 Gauging government performance provokes a diversity of
opinion and outright disagreement.
 No one fully agrees on the right way to measure what
government does.
 This is partly because government performance cannot be
measured solely in economic terms, like profits in the
world of business.
 Measuring government performance entails gauging how
well government performs its duties and functions.
 This includes using both internal measurements, such as
productivity of employees, and external measurements,
such as deciding if government has reduced the incidence
of problems like crime or poverty.
 Privatization involves examining the proper balance
between the public and private sectors.
 Proponents of privatization believe that government should
spend its time governing and let the private sector produce
and deliver most public services.
 The idea that government should privatize services because
it cannot match private sector efficiency did not set well
with traditional modes of thought in public administration.
 A number of measures are used to gauge a business’
performance, such as return on investment, market share, and
customer satisfaction, but all relate to “making money”.
 Productivity (typically defined as the ratio of inputs to outputs)
in the private sector also relates to money.
 In the private sector, companies pay attention to the efficiency
of their operations because failure to do so will result in the loss
of profits and ultimately cause the firm to go broke.
 One of the enduring questions in the public sector is whether
government should be managed like a business.
 Critics have long argued that if government would just manage
itself like a business, it would enhance its efficiency (spend less
money and time to produce comparable levels of service) and
 But, in the public sector, there is no comparable
measurement of profit, market share, or return on
investment; and the customer in the private sector is not
exactly the equivalent of citizens in the public sector.
 Government performance is much more complex and
difficult to measure than the performance of businesses in
the private sector, as government operates under a very
different set of assumptions.
 Because of the difference between the public and private
sector, it seems reasonable to use measures to gauge
government performance that are different from those used
in business.
 First of all, government does not produce products, such as
washing machines, computers, or automobiles.
 Government typically provides a broad range of services and
cannot quantify unit coasts or measure productivity as easily
as the private sector.
 In the US, the General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated
that a 5 percent increase in productivity at the federal level
would save $4.5 billion annually.
 Second of all, government is left with many of the tasks that
the private sector does not want to perform or cannot
perform, such as resolving poverty, welfare, and crime
issues; administering justice; and taking care of the sewage.
 Third of all, government is responsible for regulation and
oversight.
 Although the idea of self-regulation of industries has
gained popularity, the only reason that it may work is
because of the threat of government regulation.
 Government deals with many public goods, while the
private sector deals with private goods.
 The argument that government is “different” is still very
much a part of the government productivity and
performance debate.
 Thus, the public-private dichotomy remains an issue in the
new century.
 The bottom line for a business is profit; for the government
it has been described as power and politics.
 The system is driven by politics, not economics.
 Most major issues are very complex and difficult to
measure.
 National defense, for instance, is a very difficult activity to
measure.
 If the country is not attacked by any enemy, is that because
of powerful military and huge defense spending or is that
because there would not be any enemy incursion anyway?
 Are all spending on defense wasted then?
 As another example, do we measure the effectiveness of
airline safety, which is managed by the Federal Aviation
Administration in the US (FAA), on the number of airline
crashes that occurred during a specified time period?
 If there are no crashes during a 10-year period, does that
mean that airline safety measures were working?
 Or is it possible we were just lucky?
 When disaster strikes, we turn to government and demand
that it take action (the reactive nature of public policy), and
often we blame government for not doing enough or not
foreseeing the disaster in advance.
 Public administration has gone through a variety of phases
dealing with evaluation of its performance.
 From 1900 until the 1940s, efficiency was among the
primary goals of public administration.
 Making government more efficient and business like was
viewed as a way to end the rampant corruption associated
with that era.
 One of the key principles was to make public
administration more professional.
 It was believed that professional managers using the right
techniques could increase efficiency while ending
corruption.
 This era was followed by budgetary reforms to control
spending.
 In the 1970s, public administrators tried to enhance the
efficiency of public organizations through better
managerial techniques.
 The 1980s were characterized by the privatization
movement, which argued that government should increase
the role of the private sector to provide public services.
 Since the private sector is more efficient than government,
it was argued, efficiency would increase if government
turned over many public services to private firms.
 In the 1990s, the reinventing government movement was
introduced.
 This movement suggested that government should be more
concerned with results than process to increase efficiency.
 Public administrators should be empowered with the
freedom needed to effectively manage public agencies,
which would in turn enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
Gaugin Government Performance: A Closer View
 Since the 1970s, all levels of government have paid closer
attention to performance and productivity.
 It was recognized that government had no comprehensive
method for evaluating the performance of programs.
 Thus, public program evaluation worked its way into the
mainstream of government.
 Program evaluation is similar to policy evaluation, but it is
usually conducted by agencies, with reports provided to the
appropriate member of the legislature and executive
branch.
 Public program evaluations are systematic studies and
reviews that examine productivity, costs, and effectiveness
of government programs.
 However, the main concern of most program evaluations is
effectiveness, or measuring outcomes and goals.
 Program evaluations take many forms but are usually
conducted after a program has been functioning for some
time.
 Evaluations provide an indication about whether the
program is achieving stated objectives and goals, and they
are helpful at budget time when agencies lobby legislatures
for money.
 Program evaluations can be used for a variety of purposes,
which include trying to improve programs, justifying the
existence of programs, and investigating and auditing programs
in order to abolish them, blame them for failure, or change
leadership in an agency.
 Program evaluation usually involves developing research
designs to perform outcome evaluations that often use costbenefit analyses.
 Some of the basic questions raised in a program evaluation
include: What are the objectives of the program?
 Is the program achieving the objectives?
 What progress has been made during the time the program has
been functioning?
 What financial and other costs are being used to achieve
the stated goals?
 Are there alternatives or improvements that can be made to
make the program work more effectively and efficiently?
 Are there any unintended consequences caused by the
program?
 What recommendations
performance?
can
be
made
to
improve
 Before a program evaluation can be conducted,
performance measures and indicators must be established.
 Economists believe that most services provided by local
governments are not public goods and therefore can be provided
by the private sector.
 At one time, for instance, most local governments that collected
garbage using in-house departments did not know how much it
cost to stop the garbage truck at each house in a residential area,
that is, the unit cost per household.
 Today, most cities are well aware of their unit costs.
 When performance measures are implemented in government,
they often lead to what is called perverse measures.
 Perverse measures refer to inaccurate measurements (or poorly
constructed indicators) that do not accurately reflect whatever is
being measured.
 Usually, perverse measurements involve the attempt to
quantify something that is not easily quantifiable.
 How does a city judge the efficiency and effectiveness of
summer youth programs offered in the inner city?
 Does it count the number of programs it was able to
provide with a specified amount of funding and the cost of
each program?
 Does it use the number of people who participated in the
programs and the cost per participant?
 Or is the real measure reflected later in the number of
young people who did not end up in the criminal justice
system?
 How does one measure performance of a police officer?
 Should performance be measured by the number of arrests
the police make, or the number of calls to which he
respond?
 Performance measures provide the data to calculate unit
costs, measure satisfaction, and measure the quality and
quantity of services.
 Local governments in the US have been innovators in
developing citizen satisfaction surveys, which partially
replicate the idea of customer satisfaction data collected by
businesses.
 Since the 1970s, all levels of government have made progress
toward creating ways to measure what they do, but
governments have not been able to develop and consistently
employ performance standards that are comparable to the
private sector.
 Part of the reason is because efficiency is not the cardinal virtue
of most public organizations.
 Many of government measurements on programs and services
unfortunately will be perverse measurements because the work
of government cannot be universally quantified in terms of
profit, return on investment, and the like.
 Many officials view that nature of government work to be so
unique and divers that it cannot be subjected to standardized
performance measures.
 Many managerial techniques have been employed to try to
enhance the quality of government services and improve
performance.
 Total quality management (TQM) is one of those
techniques that were developed during the 1920s.
 Total quality management is a managerial philosophy, a set
of principles, and a series of quantitative techniques that
are designed to continuously improve production process to
ensure that customers are satisfied with an organization’s
products, performance, procedures, and people.
 Despite the best efforts of reformers and the adoption of
innovative techniques like TQM, government remains
much less efficient than the private sector at producing
services and less effective at developing meaningful ways
to measure performance.
 Efficiency compressions between government and private
organizations performing similar tasks almost always favor
the private sector.
 Thus, during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s,
many argued that government could greatly improve its
efficiency by privatizing services.