Under the label performance-based budgeting, performance information has been argued to assist politicians in budgetary decision-making. Among early advocates, this was argued to create a budgetary mechanism, under which decision-makers reward high-performers and punish low-performers, thereby allocating resources according to the value-added of programs as well as offering a clear incentive for organizational performance improvement.

However, observational findings have failed to identify this reward-punishment allocation pattern in actual budgetary outcomes (Gilmour and Lewis 2006; Heinrich 2012). More recent survey experimental findings even consistently find that poorly performing organizations are not punished, but in fact tend to receive greater funding (Nielsen and Baekgaard 2015; George et al. 2017). These studies have instead speculated that alternative rationales related to, for instance, blame-avoidance or equality might be what is guiding politicians’ budgetary responses to performance information. However, thus far we have little empirical evidence about the prevalence or impact of these decision rationales.

To address this question, this paper offers survey experimental evidence from two independent studies conducted among separate real-world samples of Danish politicians. City council politicians were presented with a vignette concerning how performance levels varied across public schools, whereas regional council politicians were asked about the public hospitals they oversee, and they were asked about their preferences for allocating budget funds between low- and high-performing organizations. Treatments containing text-based frames with different decision rationales (reward-punish, equal quality for citizens, and blame-avoidance) were then randomly assigned in order to assess how activating specific decision rationales affected preferences for budgetary allocations.

Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the findings in terms of our understanding of how political decision makers engage with performance information, as well as the likely downstream effects of different decision rationales on how public managers will subsequently use performance information for purposeful, political, or perverse means (Moynihan 2009).

Research Question: There is evidence that expanding social safety net programs improve population health. But as many as 40 percent of those eligible for many of these programs don’t actually enroll. Helping people to overcome administrative burden – particularly learning costs associated with understanding eligibility and potential benefits from such programs – has been shown to increase access to these programs. Subsequently, it may also affect important health outcomes through material gains, psychosocial stress reductions, as well as by facilitating access to other health-protective programs through program linkages. Here we present evidence about the downstream mortality consequences of reducing administrative burden for the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program.

Method: For the proposed study, we take advantage of a prior RCT which included the random assignment to letters which exogenously increased SSI awards and use it as an exogenous leverage to estimate the effects of SSI award on recipient’s mortality in a two-stage estimation procedure. The initial study identified over 4 million SSI potentially-eligible adults 65 or older and randomly sent letters to 10% of them in the final quarter of 2017, informing them of their potential eligibility.

Provisional results: We show that those who received a letter reducing learning costs and afterwards successfully enrolled in receiving SSI benefits have a substantial reduction in mortality at 54-months after receiving the letter. The results highlight that burden reduction efforts to social safety net programs can substantially reduce critical health outcomes by increasing take-up.