Rational planning and politicians’ preferences for spending and reform: replication and extension of a survey experiment

Abstract

The rational planning cycle of formulating strategic goals and using performance information to assess implementation is assumed to assist decision-making by politicians. Empirical evidence for this assumption is, however, scarce. Our study replicates Nielsen and Baekgaard's (2015) experiment on the relation between performance information and politicians' attitudes to spending and reform and extends this experiment by investigating the role of strategic goals. Based on a randomized survey experiment with 1.484 Flemish city councilors and an analysis of 225 municipal strategic plans, we found that information on low and high performance as well as strategic goals directly impact decision-making by politicians.

Institutional isomorphism, negativity bias and performance information use by politicians: A survey experiment

“…Nielsen and Baekgaard (, p. 551) frame this negativity bias in relation to performance information by indicating that ‘credit claiming [is] of much less importance than blame avoidance’, and illustrate the impact of negativity bias on politicians' attitudes to spending and reform. Moreover, their findings are successfully replicated by George et al () with Flemish local politicians. Similarly, Nielsen and Moynihan () find that politicians are more likely to attribute responsibility for performance data to administrators but only when low performance information is given.…”

“…Moreover, performance measurement has predominantly been conceptualized at the organizational, meso‐level using survey data from administrative staff (e.g., Pollanen et al ; George and Desmidt ), which inhibits our ability to elucidate the conditions under which performance information is used by individuals, at the micro‐level, and particularly by politicians. This is no trivial matter as policy‐making in many public organizations is part of the political arena where individual politicians use information—often provided by administrative staff—as well as their own political beliefs and agreements to formulate new policies and decisions related to those policies (Nielsen and Baekgaard ; George et al ). One could thus argue that performance measurement is particularly effective in public organizations when politicians purposefully use performance information to inform their evaluation and learning processes (Kroll ).…”

Never Change a Winning Policy? Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms

“…Currently, there is “less systematic evidence on how performance data alter political beliefs” (Nielsen and Moynihan , 3), which constitutes our first contribution. To the best of our knowledge, Nielsen and Baekgaard () and George et al () are the only studies linking information on public sector performance to preferences for policy reforms using data obtained from politicians . Their analysis is limited, however, to budgetary allocations and one reform option, school mergers.…”

Does strategic planning ‘work’ in public organizations? Insights from Flemish municipalities

“…George et al (2016b) present the findings of a large-scale survey experiment with 1484 Flemish city councilors and an analysis of 225 municipal strategic plans. Their paper looked at the way politicians might behave when confronted with information drawn from SP processes.…”

“…This article identifies some key drivers of effective SP in Flemish municipalities based on interviews with five expert stakeholders and three empirical articles (George et al, 2016a;2016b;. In Flanders (the northern, Dutchspeaking part of Belgium), SP was introduced in local government as part of a set of new public management (NPM) reforms.…”