Reassessing and Reconciling Reinvention in the American States: Exploring State Administrative Performance

• Author: Brendan F. Burke,Deil S. Wright
• Published date: 01 April 2002
• Date: 01 April 2002
• DOI: 10.1177/0160323X0203400101
• Subject Matter: General Interest

7Winter 2002

State and Local Government Review

Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 2002): 7–19

GENERAL INTEREST

THE DEVOLUTION REVOLUTION of the

1990s refocused attention on the

roles and capacities of the Ameri-

can states in the U.S. federal system (Dona-

hue 1999; Hovey 1999; Nathan 1996). Sim-

ultaneously, the 1990s witnessed additional

administrative “revolutions” or “reinventions”

with particular attention to the states (Bar-

rett and Greene 1999; Brudney, Hebert, and

Wright 1999; Bowling and Wright 1998). The

impetus for or source of the administrative

initiatives are many and varied, but Osborne

and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government (1992)

was perhaps the most prominent source in

terms of precipitating administrative revolu-

tion. At the end of the decade, the Govern-

ment Performance Project (GPP) and its ef-

fort to measure administrative capacity at

both the state and urban levels received much

attention from academics, practitioners, and

civic-minded elements of the national media

(Barrett and Greene 1999; Barrett, Greene,

and Mariani 2001; Donahue, Selden, and In-

graham 2000; Lynn and Heinrich 2000).

Reassessing and Reconciling Reinvention

in the American States: Exploring State

Administrative Performance

Brendan F. Burke and Deil S. Wright

The authors thank the Earhart Foundation of Ann Ar-

bor, Michigan, and the Odum Institute for Research in

Social Science at UNC–Chapel Hill for support and as-

sistance in conjunction with this research. They also

thank Jeffrey Brudney and Chung-lae Cho for helpful

comments and statistical support.

In this brief analysis, we cannot address the

numerous ramifications of reinvention or re-

form in the states, much less place recent strat-

egies in historical context (Berkman and Re-

enock 2000; Chackerian 1996; Conant 2000).

We can, however, examine the degree(s) of

convergence (or lack thereof) between recent

independent research efforts that have fo-

cused on administrative performance in the

50 states. Two separate approaches to the mea-

surement of performance-related capabilities

within the states have appeared in the leading

journals of public administration. This article

describes the two contrasting approaches, their

technical bases, and their validity when ap-

plied to contrasting reform philosophies in

different states.

Broader theoretical questions are also ex-

plored, such as: What are the roots of two sep-

arate lines of performance-oriented administra-

tive reform? Why is performance an important

current focus of bureaucratic reform? The dis-

tinct technical and theoretical nature of a top-

down versus a bottom-up reform style is

contrasted; results indicate that only a few

American states excel in both types of reform.

This examination leads to observations about

the potential difficulties in states that adhere

to only one of the administrative reform phi-

losophies as well as evidence of the advantages