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THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO DELINEATE THE MEANING OF PRODUCTIVITY FOR PUBLIC POLICY PROCESSES AND TO RAISE SOME OF THE POLICY QUESTIONS THAT ARE IMPLIED BY THIS THRUST IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION. A DEFINITION OF THE CONCEPTS INVOLVED IS PRESENTED FIRST. THEN FOLLOW DISCUSSIONS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFFORTS TO THIS POINT AND OF EXPECTED ROLES FOR PRODUCTIVITY ANALYSIS IN POLICY FORMATION.

The title of this lecture refers to organizations, politics, and public purposes to emphasize developments in the analysis of public organizations and their management and the need for that analysis to include politics as an influence on those organizations. The Gaus Award recognizes contributions in the joint tradition of public administration and political science. Organizations serve as essential components of the administrative branch of government and of virtually all other aspects of human life and many other forms of life. Social scientists that I call "organization theorists" have developed theory and research about organizations and the people in them. This body of work provides concepts and insights useful for the analysis of the organizations in government, which I call "public organizations." Organizations play crucial roles in the pursuit of values and goals shared by large aggregates of people. "Organizations, Politics, and Public Purposes: Analyzing Public Organizations and Public Management" refers to these shared values and goals as public purposes. Organizations are essential to public administration and we cannot effectively analyze organizations in public administration without concepts developed by political scientists; we need to draw on political science.

AbstractTheories of political accountability assume citizens use information about the performance of government to hold public officials accountable, but whether citizens actually use information is difficult to directly examine. We take advantage of the importance of citizen-driven, performance-based accountability for education policy in Tennessee to conduct a survey experiment that identifies the effect of new information, mistaken beliefs and differing considerations on the evaluation of public officials and policy reforms using 1,500 Tennesseans. Despite an emphasis on reporting outcomes for school accountability policies in the state, mistaken beliefs are prevalent and produce overly optimistic assessments of the institutions responsible for statewide education policy. Moreover, individuals update their assessments of these institutions in an unbiased way when provided with objective performance data about overall student performance. Providing additional information about race-related performance differences does not alter this relationship, however. Finally, support for specific policies that are intended to improve student performance is unchanged by either type of performance information; opinions about policy reforms are instead most related to race and existing partisan commitments.

In the past few years, large operating deficits have led governmental authorities in several major cities to close, sell, or substantially reduce the services of their public hospitals.' These decisions portend the arrival of what the New York Times has called a "looming crisis" in health care for the urban poor and uninsured. Should this crisis unfold, many public health programs are likely to be casualties, including those designed to treat and prevent the spread of communicable disease. Among others, programs aimed at the so-called "new" (multidrug resistant) tuberculosis are especially vulnerable to these compelling budgetary constraints. Poor urban populations face an elevated risk of contracting tuberculosis (TB); and when they do contract it, they often seek care in public hospital emergency departments. The prospect of public hospital closures obviously threatens to eliminate or reduce these sources of care, which provide many of the most accessible sites for the treatment and control of the disease. Moreover, public hospitals administer outreach programs intended to educate and serve populations at high risk of contracting TB. Healthcare experts predict that not only will tuberculosis spread faster in the absence of public hospitals, but that their closures will also place extraordinary demands on mental health programs and homeless shelters.