In public organizations, performance improvement in response to performance signals is primarily associated with accountability pressure and goal prioritization. However, it could also cause an unintended effect: effort substitution, in which organizations deliberately pay less attention to low-stakes or unmeasured goals in performance metrics. Although effort substitution narrowly focuses on efficiency in order to improve overall performance, it may also harm the equity and democracy of public organizations if their goals for public values are excluded in performance evaluation. This study examines whether there is effort substitution towards high-stake goals in public organizations triggered by negative performance feedback. While effort substitution could be undesirable for public organizations to achieve diverse public values, a very limited number of studies previously have focused on this issue.

To investigate the research interest, this study employs a regression discontinuity (RD) design based on school performance data and ratings from school quality reports in New York City public schools. The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) annually measures the performance scores and ratings of each school. The continuous performance scores and clear-cut ratings allow the RD models to compare schools’ performance at cutoff points. This paper also uses the NYC report cards from 2015 to 2019 to measure the performance output excluded from their performance management; Student achievement in Science is not included as a subset of performance evaluation in NYC public schools.

The findings present that low-performing schools improve overall performance output measured through performance evaluation while effort substitution occurs in underperforming organizations. Low-performing schools show a low proficiency in Science, which is not included in the performance evaluation. Proficiency in Science significantly dropped at the cutoff points between low performance and average performance. This study makes several contributions. First, it contributes to the burgeoning research on accountability systems by showing that performance pressure from performance information use positively affects subsequent performance in underperforming organizations. Second, it contributes to the performance management literature by showing that underperforming organizations engage in effort substitution which disregards the achievement of low-stakes accountability architecture.

Designing technically sound performance management systems is not sufficient to guarantee their success, which depends on how public managers actually use the information produced by such systems (Moynihan & Pandey, 2012). Public administration research has long debated the potential conditions of purposeful performance information use (Kroll, 2015), but relevant gaps need to be further investigated to disentangle the effectiveness of the performance management life cycle (van Dooren et al., 2015).

In this perspective, the present contribution aims at assessing the potential drivers of purposeful performance information use by public managers in the Italian local government, which represents a largely unexplored and interesting field of research since performance information is mostly used in a passive way (Cepiku et al., 2017; Nitzl et al., 2019). Specifically, the study explores how specific characteristics of the environment of local authorities (i.e. stakeholder participation) and their organization (i.e. red tape), together with the work-related characteristics (i.e. perceived social impact), and individual traits of public managers (i.e. PSM), affect the use of performance information.

Through a structural equation model, the study unveils the critical role played by stakeholder participation and perceived social impact to drive the purposeful use of performance information. Public managers are more likely to use performance information for decision-making when: (i) external stakeholders are engaged in the performance management life cycle and put pressure on using data to reach goals; (ii) public managers themselves recognize that their actions have an impact on the community and take extra-role behaviors to create public value. At the same time, the study leaves unresolved questions on the controversial effect of red tape and the link between PSM and perceived social impact in the context of performance information use.

For several decades the principal-agent framework provides an analytical basis for exploring and explaining a wide variety of dynamics and mechanisms in the realm of public administration, management and governance. The basic model describes relations between a principal, who has authorities to set rules and rewards, and a subordinate agent who has private information about her or his abilities, effort function and actions. The principal wants to motivate the agent to invest effort and contribute to the principal's interests through an optimal reward mechanism, but this may be difficult to achieve without knowing the private information that the agent holds. The agent may use the information strategically in order to direct the principal towards a contract that will primarily serve the agent's interests. Under such circumstances the principal faces a major problem to control, monitor or motivate the agent behavior.

This model has been applied to analyze managerial problems in the public sector, the relations between different actors such as politicians and bureaucrats, as well as serving as a basis for the idea of performance management in the context of NPM. It is also an important tool in analyzing the structuring of accountability and governance mechanisms and explaining their (un)effectiveness. Furthermore, to a large extent this framework sets the analytical grounds for the measurement hype that characterizes many societies in recent decades, because both theory and practice suggest that measurement of performance and processes may help in achieving an optimal contract.

Clearly, there is a lot of criticism directed towards this framework and its application. Therefore, we believe that the time arrived to discuss the different aspects of this framework and assess its effectiveness and possible future developments.

In this paper, we present to core idea of the model and various analytical and empirical complications that may help address some of the critics towards the framework. Specifically, we suggest that in reality there is a net of principal-agent relations where a player may be a principal in one interaction and an agent in another which reflect on the motivation of principals to monitor agents. Furthermore, when principals attempt to motivate agents through performance management mechanisms, measurement, and incentive schemes, agents are most likely to respond by manipulation, distortion and gaming which make such mechanisms difunctional. We discuss three main applications of the model to illustrate its pros and cons, and finally discuss possible directions to develop the framework further and integrate it coherently within the public administration literature. These include both a theoretical model and integration of rationales developed in behavioral economics.

How do politics, organizational practices and governance doctrines impact policy performance? With increased attention to coordination across silo structures, proliferation of vertical structures by agencification and supranational actors, it is unclear what significance ministries carry for the governance of public policies. An institutional perspective highlights the importance of polities and the dynamic nature of institutions in the face of changed conditions. The paper seeks to give a combined explanation for how institutional arrangement and increasing degree of complexity together can give insight into modern governance structures. Through a comparative case study of the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) the paper addresses the question of gambling policy. Despite formulating similar political goals, the Nordic countries place gambling in different ministerial departments (Denmark: Ministry of Taxation, Finland: Ministry of the Interior, Norway: Ministry of Culture, and Sweden: Ministry of Finance) and organize the gambling market through either a monopoly (Finland & Norway) or license market (Denmark & Sweden). By drawing on public documents (policy documents, ministerial steering letters and agency reports) we focus on the saliency of gambling on the political agenda and steering practices, but also evidence of policy performance.