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Abstract: This paper outlines the current state of play in relation to performance information in the Australian Public Service. It highlights the findings of the evaluation of the past decade of management reform in The Australian Public Service Reformed and the Management Advisory Board's Building a Better Public Service in relation to performance information.It outlines some of the recent initiatives at commonwealth level to improve the quality of performance information. It touches briefly on benchmarking (noting that this topic is covered by other papers at the same session and at the conference). It sets out the rationale behind the recent changes to annual reporting requirements for commonwealth departments: to provide parliamentarians with more focused information and reduce unnecessary duplication and paper overload. Reports so far have tended to confirm the success of this strategy, with some modifications required to provide more detail in agencies' documentation provided at budget time.It sets out the findings of the recent Department of Finance paper on the use of evaluation in the 1994–95 Budget—in summary, some 75% of proposals for new spending or savings in the budget were influenced by the results of evaluation.Finally, it makes some observations about the success of the Australian system of making public servants responsible for outcomes as well as outputs, and suggests that this is in part the reason why we have been able to make our evaluation strategy stick.

AbstractYears of research on performance management has generally concluded that performance information is seldom used purposefully by public managers and that it does not improve performance as intended. More recently, both theoretical and empirical work have begun to focus on situations in which performance management may facilitate internal organizational learning. In this study, we focus on one key component in performance management systems, namely generation of performance information. Based on a Bayesian learning model, we argue that generation of performance information at the individual level may create performance improvements because both users and frontline workers may learn where to prioritize their efforts. To test the isolated effect of this key component of any performance management system, we use as-good-as-random variation in exposure of students to testing because of a technical breakdown in an IT system. We identify the effect of testing on student learning measured two years after the breakdown. Results show positive and statistically significant effects of about 0.1 standard deviations, which is comparable to much more expensive interventions, and effects tend to persist after four years. We find larger effects for students with low socioeconomic status but also that schools with many students from this group are more reluctant to measure their performance. Implications and limitations in terms of increasing the level of student testing are discussed.

DRMI Working Paper Series ; PMRC 2019: Public Management Research Conference (PMRC) ; Note by author: "This manuscript is in progress and will be presented at PMRC 2019. Please do not cite without permission from the author." ; The question of how public managers use public sector performance information received significant scholarly attention in recent years. The promise of performance management systems was to rationalize the decision making process by creating objective performance metrics that citizens, political officials, and public managers could use to assess the performance of public organizations. Some theoretical work suggests, however, that there is a certain subjectivity to these data, which arises from an individual's role in their organization or broader political environment. Furthermore, a recent spate of experimental work in this area suggests subjectivity might also arise, at the individual level, through cognitive bias. I bridge these two bodies of scholarship with a framework of performance information processing, which incorporates four models of political information use into the story of how public managers use performance information. I suggest that cognitive bias can contribute to the subjectivity of performance information when public managers process performance information. In other words, a model of meaning avoidance suggests that managers accurately receive performance information from management systems, but that cognitive biases influence the ways in which they interpret or act upon that information. In this essay, I provide empirical evidence for this model. I show that despite different presentations, public managers can accurately recount the objective information they saw when asked to recall it. I also provide evidence that despite being equally aware of objective raw performance metrics, public managers exhibit evidence of cognitive bias when asked to interpret the meaning of that information. This study contributes to the broader discussion of how individuals use performance information.

__Abstract__ This article explores the introduction of performance measurement tools in new democracies by presenting a qualitative study based on Estonian governmental documents and performance audits. A set of specific factors help to explain difficulties in introducing performance measurement tools in immature policy environments: instability, poor strategic planning and policy analysis, an implementation gap and uncritical, uninformed transfer of Western performance management initiatives. Although the authors recognize the limits of generalizations based on the Estonian example, the presence of such 'transitional' factors is likely to make the development of performance measurement in new democracies even more complicated than in the West.

AbstractThis study examines whether performance information affects the political agenda. I offer and test two hypotheses on performance information in politics—the attention‐allocation hypothesis, suggesting that politicians leverage performance data to devote attention to problems in service delivery, and the politicization hypothesis, stating that political concerns alter elected officials focus on performance information. I examine the hypotheses by gathering administrative data on pupils' standardized test scores combined with more than 6000 min of meetings in Danish municipal school committees, on which I leverage two‐way fixed effects models. The results show that performance shortfalls receive political attention, regardless of the politicization of the environment. In contrast to a vast literature stating how the political context alters attention to performance information, these results demonstrate that political entities leverage performance data to discover problems in need of attention in ways similar to those of other types of organizations.

We live in the age of quantified performance. It is no longer sufficient to believe that a public sector organization does its job well, in general terms; or that the professionals within that organization can be relied upon. We want data that will allow us to judge and compare the behavior of service providers. In the new millennium, the number of schemes designed to satisfy this demand for performance data has grown substantially. The growth of rating and ranking programs is one of the dominant trends in contemporary public services reform (see also Arndt, 2007). As we shall show, ranking and rating schemes can vary in structure; sometimes they are established by government alone, and sometimes by a mix of governmental and private organizations; other rankings are private initiatives. Their ostensible aim is to improve control over the performance of service providers. In some cases control is exercised by central agencies, whose capacity to detect laggards is thought to be improved by such systems. Increasingly, control is also to be exercised by citizens, who are expected to use performance information to guide their own decisions about the choice of service providers (Coe & Brunet, 2006). The rationale for adoption of such systems seems difficult to challenge at first glance; they are often pitched as mechanisms for improving "transparency" and "accountability", concepts that are now so thoroughly entrenched in popular discourse that they have become banalities (Hood, 2007b). .