How Do Elected Officials Evaluate Performance? Goal Preferences, Governance Preferences, and the Process of Goal Reprioritization

Christensen, Julian; Dahlmann, Casper Mondrup; Mathiasen, Asbjørn Hovgaard; Moynihan, Donald P.; Petersen, Niels Bjørn Grund

doi:10.1093/jopart/muy030

Cited by 8 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There is growing evidence reporting negativity bias in public managers' use of performance information (e.g., Flink ; Holm ), but research on how politicians respond to performance information is relatively scarce. Further, the extant research has often relied on survey data (e.g., Christensen et al ; Nielsen and Baekgaard ; Nielsen and Moynihan ). To our knowledge, there have been few observational studies that explore how performance information affects political decision making for salient and high‐profile issues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Hong

Kim

2019

Public Administration Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores how political principals weigh loyalty and competence in public personnel decisions. Exploiting the abrupt shift in political leadership following the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye of Korea, the authors examine how the newly elected president made the decision to retain or dismiss 118 agency heads appointed by the previous administration. The evidence shows the importance of loyalty in managerial survival: those who had a political patronage relationship with the ousted president were less likely to survive in the new administration. However, the authors also demonstrate the relevance of competence, as measured by the outcomes of agency performance evaluation. Further, the article shows the existence of negativity bias: the punishment for low performance is greater than the reward for high performance. Finally, the authors provide support for the idea that political principals reward loyalists, but only if they show acceptable levels of competence. Evidence for Practice• This study explores how political principals weigh loyalty and competence in public personnel decisions. • Political principals' punishment for low performance is greater than their rewards for good performance. • Political principals reward loyalists, but only if they show acceptable levels of competence.• The availability of performance information may protect bureaucratic expertise from political opportunism.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Hong

Kim

2019

Public Administration Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An effective reasoning strategy that people can (consciously or subconsciously) use to remain confident in their choices is goal reprioritization (Christensen et al ), where people retrospectively reweight the perceived importance of information depending on the (in)convenience of the information (Festinger ; Simon et al ; Groenendyk ; Christensen et al ). This implies that, following a choice between competing options, people will seek to magnify the perceived importance of advantages associated with their choice (relative to alternative options) while downplaying the importance of relative disadvantages associated with that choice.…”

Section: How Choices May Motivate Biased Performance Evaluationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent psychologically informed literature has demonstrated how people's performance evaluations can often be distorted by cognitive (Olsen , ; Andersen and Hjortskov ) and politically motivated biases (Marvel , ; Baekgaard and Serritzlew ; Hvidman and Andersen ; Baekgaard et al ; James and Van Ryzin ; Christensen et al ). These findings of distorted performance evaluations all question the extent to which (dis)satisfaction among users of service providers can be seen as a meaningful reflection of the provider's actual performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The users are thus expected to be biased in a positive direction when evaluating the performance of their own provider. Specifically, it is hypothesized that users will engage in goal reprioritization (Christensen et al ), where they opportunistically alter the weight they assign to specific pieces of performance information depending on the (in)convenience of that information. Users are expected to find performance information important if it shows their provider to perform well (compared to competing providers) while downplaying the importance of information showing their provider to perform less well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Biased, not blind: An experimental test of self‐serving biases in service users’ evaluations of performance information

Christensen

2018

Public Administration

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Based on literature about motivated reasoning, this article proposes that choosing a public service provider from among competing options may bias service users in a positive direction when evaluating the performance of their chosen provider. Users are expected to defend their choice through processes of goal reprioritization, meaning that they will alter the weight they assign to given pieces of information depending on the (in)convenience of that information. This article uses nine experimental studies to test this expectation on students who had recently chosen to study at one university instead of competing universities. As expected, findings show signs of biases in students’ evaluations, but the biases are small and not consistently significant. Thus, prior research may have been too pessimistic regarding the general potential of performance information in the public sector.

show abstract

“…Also troubling for public managers, motivated reasoning can infect assessments of public organizational or program performance (Christensen et al, 2018;Nielsen & Moynihan, 2017;Olsen, 2017). Citizens have been shown to display dimmer views of government performance in politicized areas such as the U.S.…”

Section: The Partisan Brain and Its Shortcomingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Erosion of Trust During a Global Pandemic and How Public Administrators Should Counter It

Deslatte

2020

The American Review of Public Administration

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article argues that public administrators must advance a more equity-based assessment of vulnerabilities in American communities and more risk-based communication strategies. It provides an overview of partisan motivated reasoning, how this has influenced the response to the coronavirus pandemic. Experimental evidence then demonstrates how the framing of the pandemic can influence trust in various public messengers. The coronavirus pandemic is merely one of the many exigent threats humanity faces today. Public administrators are the planners, engineers, analysts, auditors, lawyers, and managers on the front lines of these existential crises. It is their job to sift through the information environment and—however boundedly—tackle problems. For the sake of the American democracy, public administrators need to regain the people’s trust. They could start by leveling with them about the challenges ahead.

show abstract

How Do Elected Officials Evaluate Performance? Goal Preferences, Governance Preferences, and the Process of Goal Reprioritization

Cited by 8 publications

References 40 publications

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Biased, not blind: An experimental test of self‐serving biases in service users’ evaluations of performance information

The Erosion of Trust During a Global Pandemic and How Public Administrators Should Counter It

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About