Research in public administration and public management has distinctive features that
influence the choices and application of research methods. Periods of change and upheaval …

In times of rising expectations and decreasing resources for the public sector, performance
management is high on the agenda. Increasingly, the value of the performance …

Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can
be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations …

Aggregate indexes of the quality of governance, covering large samples of countries, have
become popular in comparative political analysis. Few studies examine the validity or …

The contemporary performance movement has tended to assume that a key to restoring
public trust in civil servants lies in a focus on outcomes or results. But there is growing …

How well do governments do in converting the resources they take from us, like taxes, into
services that improve the well-being of individuals, groups, and society as a whole? In other …

Effective government matters, but what is it? Good governance indicators go some way to
provide a definition, but how much do they say about what effectiveness is, why this is so …

The era of economic liberalization, spanning 1978 to 2008, is often regarded as a period in
which government was simply dismantled. In fact, government was reconstructed to meet the …

In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly
package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World …

Targets, rankings and intelligence are common forms of public service management by
numbers. So what's global and what's distinctively English about this phenomenon? What's …