The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

• Published date: 01 March 2003
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6210.00280
• Author: Jerrell D. Coggburn,Saundra K. Schneider
• Date: 01 March 2003

206 Public Administration Review •March/April 2003, Vol. 63, No. 2

Jerrell D. Coggburn

The University of Texas at San Antonio

Saundra K. Schneider

University of South Carolina

The Quality of Management and

Government Performance: An Empirical

Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public ad-

ministration, and political science. Government’s administrative arrangements and managerial

behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, con-

sidering public management’s effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and

government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School’s Government Perfor-

mance Project to examine the relationship between state governments’ managerial capacity and a

measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state man-

agement capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of

management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely

(that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis

demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each

have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place mana-

gerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influ-

ence on government activities.

Introduction

Since its inception, public administration has been con-

cerned with government performance. Indeed, the years

following Woodrow Wilson’s (1887) call to make the “busi-

ness of government more businesslike” have witnessed a

litany of reform commission recommendations, incompre-

hensible waves of administrative reform (McGregor 2000;

Light 1997), a seemingly endless stream of managerial fads

(such as zero-based budgeting, planning, programming and

budgeting, management by objectives, and total quality

management), not to mention a keen interest within the

scholarly community for researching administrative reform,

innovations, best practices, and the like. Together, these

attest to the enduring importance placed on achieving high

performance from government’s administrative machinery.

Following this tradition, in the 1980s a group of schol-

ars began studying in earnest the links between public man-

agement and government performance (Brudney, O’Toole,

and Rainey 2000). The “public management” label is im-

portant because it denotes research focusing primarily on

administrative activities (methods, structures, behaviors,

etc.) that take place within government agencies and their

influence on program design and implementation (Graham

and Hays 1993). The overarching theoretical rationale for

Jerrell D. Coggburn is an assistant professor in the Department of Public

Administration at the The University of Texas at San Antonio. His research

focuses on the causes and consequences of administrative reform in the

American states, particularly in public human resources management. Email:

jcoggburn@utsa.edu.

Saundra K. Schneider is a professor and director of the master of public

administration program in the Department of Government and International

Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the role

of administrative forces in public policy making, particularly in the develop-

ment of health, welfare, and disaster relief programs in the American states.

Email: saundra-schneider@sc.edu.