Requirements for outcomes-based performance management are increasing performance-evaluation activities at all government levels. Research on public-sector performance management, however, points to problems in the design and management of these systems and questions their effectiveness as policy tools for increasing governmental accountability. In this article, I analyze experimental data and the performance-management experiences of federal job-training programs to estimate the influence of public management and system-design factors on program outcomes and impacts. I assess whether relying on administrative data to measure program outcomes (rather than impacts) produces information that might misdirect program managers in their performance-management activities. While the results of empirical analyses confirm that the use of administrative data in performance management is unlikely to produce accurate estimates of true program impacts, they also suggest these data can still generate useful information for public managers about policy levers that can be manipulated to improve organizational performance.

How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes ? This question, of fundamental importance in the fields of politics, policy implementation, public administration, and public management, motivates the systematic study of governance. In this article, we present a logic of governance, based in political economy literatures, that might be used as a first step toward framing theory-based governance research. We also describe a methodological approach that is more likely to appropriately identify and explain relationships in governance regimes that involve activities and interactions that span more than one level of an organization or systemic structure. In addition, we explore the potential of various sources of data for governance research, recognizing that governance researchers will inevitably have to make simplifying assumptions or measure crudely things that we know are much more complex. We argue that when appropriately framed and interpreted through a logic of governance that acknowledges limitations attributable to the models, methods, and data employed, governance research is more likely to produce enduring knowledge about how, why, and with what consequences public-sector activity is structured and managed. Public policies and programs, including many social programs, are carried out in the public, nonprofit, and proprietary sectors through webs of states, regions, special districts, service delivery areas, local offices, independent organizations, collaborative associations, partnerships, or other administrative entities. In most cases, the outcomes, efficiency, or effectiveness of these administrative entities vary significantly; some are more successful than others. Confronting this variation in performance, 233/ Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 'Two separate intellectual traditions have contributed to the etymology of the term governance in public administration (Muward 1999; O'Toole 1999). First, the study of institutions has emphasized the mulnlayered structural context of rulegoverned understandings. Public-choice scholars are among the primary contributors to the institutional roots of governance research. Second, the study of networks has emphasized "the role of multiple social actors in networks of negotiation, implementation, and delivery. .. 'governance' requires social partners and the knowledge of how to concert action among them. . ." (O'Toole 1999). 'We use the terms configuration, regime, arrangement, and system interchangeably, even though each term has somewhat different connotations. They have in common the idea of many interacting elements whose collective effect is nonadditive, and (hat is our meaning.

We use the principal-agent model as a focal theoretical frame for synthesizing what we know both theoretically and empirically about the design and dynamics of the implementation of performance management systems in the public sector. In this context, we review the growing body of evidence about how performance measurement and incentive systems function in practice and how individuals and organizations respond and adapt to them over time, drawing primarily on examples from performance measurement systems in public education and social welfare programs. We also describe a dynamic framework for performance measurement systems that takes into account strategic behavior of individuals over time, learning about production functions and individual responses, accountability pressures, and the use of information about the relationship of measured performance to value-added. Implications are discussed and recommendations derived for improving public sector performance measurement systems.2

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical findings are (a) that the short run measures used to monitor performance are weakly, and sometimes perversely, related to long run impacts and (b) that the efficiency gains or losses from cream skimming are small. We find evidence that centers respond to performance standards.

The study of administrative burden-experienced in individual encounters with government-is being renewed with new theoretical developments and policy applications. Building on recent developments, this article aims to broaden the conceptual framing of administrative burden and extend its empirical investigation beyond concerns about access to and efficiency of public services to questions of individual and societal impacts. It also expands beyond the typical US or developed country context to examine this phenomenon in the setting of a large social protection program in South Africa, where the "bite" of administrative burden may potentially be bigger. The empirical analysis uses data from the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) evaluation to investigate how CSG program rules and requirements affected administrative burdens and erected barriers to grant receipt. The findings show that 60% of CSG recipients experienced an interruption or disconnection in grant receipt that appears to be associated with administrative burden, with 80% of those stoppages in error. The resulting loss of monthly benefits has significant negative implications for the outcomes of adolescents targeted by the program. I thank the Economic Policy Research Institute for support of my early work with these data, which motivated this research, and Robert Brill, formerly a graduate student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, for his contributions toward cleaning and programming the data for analysis. I also thank the referees for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article, as well as

As performance‐based contracting in social welfare services continues to expand, concerns about potential unintended effects are also growing. We analyze the incentive effects of high‐powered, performance‐based contracts and their implications for program outcomes using panel data on Dutch cohorts of unemployed and disabled workers that were assigned to private social welfare providers in 2002 to 2005. We employ a difference‐in‐differences design that takes advantage of the fact that contracts gradually moved from partial performance‐contingent pay to full (100 percent) performance‐contingent contracting schemes. We develop explicit measures of selection into the programs and find evidence of cream skimming and other gaming activities on the part of providers, but little impact of these activities on program outcomes. Moving to a system with contract payments fully contingent on performance appears to increase job placements, but not job duration, for more readily employable workers.

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Changes in funding, clientele, and treatment practices of public and privately owned substance abuse treatment programs, compelled in part by increased cost containment pressures, have prompted researchers' investigations of the implications of organizational form for treatment programs. These studies primarily probe associations between ownership status, patient characteristics, and services delivered and do not empirically link organizational form or structure to treatment outcomes. Data from the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study (NTIES) were used to study the relationship of ownership and other dimensions of publicness identified in the public management literature to patient outcomes, controlling for patient characteristics, treatment experiences, and other program characteristics. A few effects of organizational form and structure on substance abuse treatment outcomes are statistically significant (primarily improved social functioning), although the specific contributions of measures of ownership and publicness to explaining program-level variation are generally small.