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Government Reform, Political Ideology, and Administrative Burden: The Case of Performance Management in the Bush Administration
Author(s) -
Lavertu Stéphane,
Lewis David E.,
Moynihan Donald P.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
public administration review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.721
H-Index - 139
eISSN - 1540-6210
pISSN - 0033-3352
DOI - 10.1111/puar.12132
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , ideology , public administration , administration (probate law) , government (linguistics) , politics , political science , public relations , business , sociology , law , social science , linguistics , philosophy
This article examines how ideological differences between political officials and agencies may have affected the implementation of an ostensibly nonpartisan, government‐wide administrative initiative: the George W. Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool ( PART ) review of federal programs. The analysis reveals that managers in agencies associated with liberal programs and employees (“liberal agencies”) agreed to a greater extent than those in agencies associated with conservative programs and employees (“conservative agencies”) that PART required significant agency time and effort and that it imposed a burden on management resources. Further analysis reveals that differences in reported agency effort can be explained partly by objective differences in the demands that PART placed on agencies—liberal agencies were required to evaluate more programs and implement more improvement plans relative to their organizational capacity—and partly by the ideological beliefs of employees—on average, liberal managers reported more agency effort, even after accounting for objective measures of administrative burden .