Public Administration Needs to Become a Player in the Ratings and Rankings Business

• Author: James L. Perry
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12628
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016

Public Administration Needs to Become a Player in the Ratings and Rankings Business 697

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 5, pp. 697–698. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12628.

Editorial

I n the July/August 2016 issue, I shared some

ideas about how to advance global public

administration knowledge (Perry 2016 ). I

suggested five specific strategies that could help to

move public administration toward a more global

knowledge base. In this issue, I would like to

expand on one of the five strategies, database and

measurement development.

In the editorial, I noted public administration ’ s lag

in the development of databases, constructs, and

indices. Public administration scholars have been

slow to embrace developing core field constructs

and measurement scales to advance knowledge

accumulation. We can point, however, to some

exceptions of relatively recent origins. They include

scales to measure policy alienation, administrator ’ s

trust in citizens, public service motivation,

collaboration, red tape, and individual level of

globalism (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2016 ). Much more

remains to be done with respect to phenomena and

units of analysis that are objects of interest for public

administration scholars and practitioners.

The editorial also called attention to the growing

number of rankings related to governance and public

service. The growth of ratings and rankings dates

to at least the early 1990s, a movement in sync

with results-driven governments, fueled by calls to

reinvent the government. The public administration

community has been an occasional participant in

ranking and ratings. Gormley and Weimer ’ s ( 1999 )

Organizational Report Cards was an early contribution

to measuring public service performance for the

public ’ s consumption. The Government Performance

Project, led by Patricia Ingraham and funded by the

PEW Charitable Trusts, was another foray by public

administration scholars into developing rankings

and ratings (Ingraham, Joyce, and Donahue 2003).

More recently, Christopher Hood, Ruth Dixon, and

Craig Beeston ( 2008 ) investigated a wide range of

international rankings in seeking to identify a second-

generation approach.

The growing importance of rankings and ratings is

the subject of a recently published book, Ranking the

World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance,

edited by Alexander Cooley and Jack Snyder

(Cooley and Snyder 2015 ). The book conveys two

modern realities. The first is that states and substate

jurisdictions are now judged by many high-profile

indices, which include assessments of levels of

corruption, government effectiveness, and the rule of

law. The second reality—and for me the motivating

reality—is that the rankings represent value judgments

and methodological choices that often receive little

scrutiny from the public administration community.

I would like to see this second reality change.

An Example

A quick review of the World Bank ’ s Worldwide

Governance Indicators (WGI) illustrates why many

of the rankings are relevant for public administration.

WGI measures six broad dimensions of governance.

At least four of the dimensions refer to concepts

universally familiar to public administration

practitioners and scholars: (1) voice and accountability;

(2) government effectiveness; (3) rule of law; and (4)

control of corruption. A fifth dimension, regulatory

quality, is arguably closely related to how at least some,

perhaps many, of us conceive of public administration.

Only political stability and absence of violence might

generally be understood as outside the core of public

administration.

How many of us are even familiar with WGI, much

less have used any of the publicly available data or

sought to assess its validity? One of our colleagues,

Laura Langbein from American University, in

collaboration with Steven Knack from the World

Bank (Langbein and Knack 2010 ), has analyzed

the WGI dimensions. They arrive at an interesting

conclusion about the six dimensions of WGI: “…we

conclude that the six indexes do not discriminate

usefully among different aspects of governance.

Rather, each of the indexes—whatever its label—

merely reflects perceptions of the quality of

James L. Perry

Indiana University, Bloomington

Public Administration Needs to Become a Player in the

Ratings and Rankings Business