We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

• Author: Stéphane Lavertu
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12436
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Date: 01 November 2016

Stéphane Lavertu is associate

professor in the John Glenn College of

Public Affairs, The Ohio State University.

Much of his research examines how politics

affects the design and operation of public

agencies. He is particularly interested in

how politics affects the administration of

public education.

E-mail: lavertu.1@osu.edu

864 Public Administration Review • November | December 2014

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 6, pp. 864–872. © 2015 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12436.

Stéphane Lavertu

The Ohio State University

Abstract: Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public

administration.  is “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs,

but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well-known problems with public sector perfor-

mance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative

data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the adminis-

tration of public programs.  e latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity

of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture.  e author illustrates these poten-

tial problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration

scholars could help improve governance in the data-rich future by informing the development and dissemination of

organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.

Practitioner Points

• Although it is widely acknowledged that f‌l awed performance measurement abounds and poses a problem for

public administration, the notion that “big data” can make matters worse is seldom addressed.

•  e performance measurement that greater data availability enables can lead to misperceptions about organi-

zational performance and f‌l awed decision making, particularly among actors external to public agencies (e.g.,

policy makers and citizens).

• Public administration scholars could help make the best of our data-rich future by playing a more active role

in researching and designing performance metrics for external audiences so that performance information

promotes more valid inferences about the value of organizations administering public programs.

of policy research well beyond the federal execu-

tive branch (Radin 2000).  ey increasingly enable

political actors external to public agencies—such as

legislators, judges, administrators in other agencies,

researchers in think tanks and advocacy organizations,

and citizens—to observe and evaluate administrative

behavior at all levels of government.  ese external

actors have demonstrated sustained demand for

information on administrative performance (Gormley

and Weimer 1999; Hood, Dixon, and Beeston 2008;

Van de Walle and Roberts 2008), and technological

advances—that is, advances in our ability to collect,

analyze, and disseminate information—increasingly

enable fulf‌i llment of that demand.1  e widespread

belief that these technological advances will continue

to accelerate suggests that external political actors’ use

of performance metrics to assess the value of organiza-

tions administering public programs also will con-

tinue to increase signif‌i cantly.2

Commentators have emphasized the opportunities

that “big data” and “data analytics” present for policy

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure

of Public Administration

The Brownlow Committee famously declared

that “[t]he President needs help.” In particular,

the committee’s report asserted that the presi-

dent needed staf‌f to “assist him in obtaining quickly

and without delay all pertinent information possessed

by any of the executive departments so as to guide

him in making his decisions” (PCAM 1937, 5).  e

committee considered this collection and synthesis

of administrative information critical for improv-

ing the ef‌f‌i ciency and accountability of American

government. Importantly, advances in our ability

to collect and analyze administrative data facilitated

the expanded role of such analysis in the manage-

ment of the federal executive branch, as illustrated by

the implementation of the Planning, Programming,

and Budgeting System in the 1960s and, later, the

implementation of performance-based “New Public

Management” reforms (Reschenthaler and  ompson

1996).

Advances in information technology and analyti-

cal techniques have also facilitated the proliferation