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

Abstract

Performance data allows politicians to exert accountability over public organizations, even as ideological biases can affect how they interpret such data. However, we know little about how motivated decision-makers prioritize goals when facing multiple pieces of contradictory performance data that reflect the competing goals of public services. Such goal conflict is an inherent aspect of public management. To understand its implications for the use of performance data use we develop a theory of goal reprioritization. We start by assuming that elected officials have preferences between specific policy goals, and about governance processessuch as a preference for public or private service provision. When elected officials face contradictory pieces of performance data, governance preferences drive performance evaluations to the point that they are willing to reweight their goal preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance. We offer experimental evidence of this process, showing that elected officials asked to evaluate school performance reprioritize between two distinct policy goals for schoolstest scores and student well-beingto fit with their governance preferences. Reprioritization is an attractive strategy since it allows elected officials to claim they are using performance data, even as underlying governance preferences lead them to set aside the evaluative goal-based criteria by which they would otherwise make performance evaluations. In other words, preferences concerning the nature of government can trump goal preferences when decision-makers use performance data.

Behavioral public strategy

“…(2018) identified how cognitive dissonance influences performance evaluations by Danish policymakers in the sense that preferences concerning the nature of government become more important than goal preferences. These studies thus indicate that heuristics can influence how strategic decisions are made (George et al, 2018a), as well as how these decisions could influence effectiveness (Christensen et al, 2018) and efficiency (Nielsen & Baekgaard, 2015) in public organizations and networks.…”

“…The recent influx of theories from behavioral science into public policy (Oliver, 2013) and public administration (Grimmelikhuijsen et al, 2017) research offers an important starting point to elucidate the need for and focus of behavioral public strategy. Such research has shown: (1) the existence of several heuristics, or shortcuts, taken by policymakers that might result in biased strategic decisions (e.g., Nielsen & Baekgaard, 2015;Christensen et al, 2018;George et al, 2020); (2) that psychological characteristics of policymakers impact their ethical, information-seeking and learning behavior (e.g., Kroll, 2014;Stazyk & Davis, 2015;George, 2020); (3) that group dynamics among teams of policymakers influence the quality of strategic decisions as well as trust-related outcomes between these policymakers (e.g., Grissom, 2014;Klijn et al, 2010;; (4) that team composition influences shared understanding among policymakers, financial decisions and learning with partners (e.g., Opstrup & Villadsen, 2015;Siddiki et al, 2017;Desmidt et al, 2018); and, finally, (5) that strategy tools employed by policymakers can be boundary-spanning or sense-making objects, but can also induce specific heuristics and lead to biased strategic decisions (e.g., Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011;Vining, 2011;Bryson et al, 2016;Höglund et al, 2018,). As such, a variety of public service performance dimensions can be affected, ranging from quality, efficiency, effectiveness, equity, service outcomes and responsiveness to more governance-related outcomes through these micro-level behavioral phenomena (Walker et al, 2010).…”

Conflictual Accountability: Behavioral Responses to Conflictual Accountability of Agencies

“…Broadly constituted accountability regimes are easily associated with goal conflict (J. Christensen et al, 2018) and tensions between multiple relevant norms (Thomann et al, 2018). Conflictual expectations and value conflicts are sometimes also embedded within the operations of public organizations.…”

“…Finally, although implicit in many of the issues above, several scholars explicitly point at what is the key problem in this study: the problem of conflictual expectations . Broadly constituted accountability regimes are easily associated with goal conflict (J. Christensen et al, 2018) and tensions between multiple relevant norms (Thomann et al, 2018).…”

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

“…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.…”