Government Checking Government: How Performance Measures Expand Distributive Politics
29 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2009
Date Written: July 30, 2009
Abstract
This paper argues that distributive politics operates in a variety of contexts in which governments seek to check the behavior of other governments. We provide a novel theoretical account of performance measurement systems as political discipline mechanisms even when measures are compiled by formally independent administrative agencies. We test the implications of our theory using a dataset of performance ratings in English local government assessed between 2002-2006. Results suggest that political influence favors swing voters, and local authorities sharing party affiliation with the incumbent central government are favored over those controlled by the opposition. Evidence further suggests that the independent rater in our empirical case is influenced through ties between its membership and the local authorities that it regulates. Our theoretical argument and findings have implications for many national and international contexts.
Keywords: Performance Measurement, Distributive Politics, Independent Agencies, British Politics
JEL Classification: H77, D73
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By James J. Heckman, Jeffrey A. Smith, ...
-
The Performance of Performance Standards
By James J. Heckman, Carolyn Heinrich, ...
-
The Performance of Performance Standards
By James J. Heckman, Carolyn Heinrich, ...
-
An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Performance
By Pascal Courty and Gerald Marschke
-
An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Explicit Performance Incentives
By Pascal Courty and Gerald Marschke
-
By Steven Kelman and John N. Friedman
-
Targeting Labour Market Programmes: Results from a Randomized Experiment
By Stefanie Behncke, Markus Frölich, ...
-
Effort as Investment: Analyzing the Response to Incentives
By John N. Friedman and Steven Kelman