What Can Performance Information Do to Legislators? A Budget‐Decision Experiment with Legislators

• Author: Labinot Demaj
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12713
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

366 Public Administration Review • May | June 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 366–379. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12713.

Labinot Demaj is a postdoctoral

researcher at the University of St. Gallen,

Switzerland, and director of the Behavioral

Lab of the University of St. Gallen.

E-mail: labinot.demaj@unisg.ch

Abstract : Studies on the influence of performance information on budgeting decisions have produced contradictory

findings. This article offers a framework of the parliamentary context that links performance information to

legislators’ budgeting decisions. The framework suggests that the impact on politicians’ allocations will differ depending

on whether performance information is reflected in the budget proposal, whether the allocation issue concerns a

politically difficult trade-off for the decision maker, and whether information falls into a receptive partisan mind. The

experimental study uses 57 actual legislators. The results show that the introduction of performance information into

legislators’ deliberation process leads to stronger deviations from the status quo allocation. This difference occurs because

performance information highlights more clearly the expected consequences of budgetary changes and allows for more

pronounced reactions. More informed decisions, however, might make compromise among legislators more difficult

because individual positions will become more polarized.

Practitioner Points

• The potential for information to impinge on individuals’ decisions varies based on the degree to which

ideology and interests predispose political actors’ positions.

• The availability of information makes individuals’ decisions more extreme because they can evaluate more

clearly the consequences of their decisions.

• Information is most effective for policy problems when an actor ’ s ideology and interests clearly suggest how a

“good liberal” or a “good conservative” would position.

• Understanding of the nature of the decisions political actors face and why they have a need for policy

information is necessary to prevent valuable policy information from becoming ammunition for the side that

finds its conclusions supportive.

Labinot Demaj

University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

What Can Performance Information Do to Legislators?

A Budget-Decision Experiment with Legislators

R esearch on the impact of performance

information on government budgeting

can be divided into two fields. One field is

concerned with both broad correlations between the

content and use of available information and final

allocation outcomes. Results from this field provide

mixed insights, but the overall balance is negative

and suggests that information has no significant

effect on the manner in which government budgets

are constituted (Heinrich 2012 ). The other field of

research focuses on the individual and how public

managers deal with performance data (Pollitt 2006a ).

Studies on politicians’ performance information

behavior are rare. Existing works have analyzed

the ways legislators use available information and

investigated whether they perceive performance-

related data as useful for their decision-making process

(Askim 2007 , 2008 , 2009 ; Hou et al. 2011 ; Raudla

2012 ; ter Bogt 2001 , 2003 , 2004 ). For this field of

research, results are also mixed. However, the reported

insights are pessimistic overall.

Recently, a small number of researchers have started

to question these insights based on methodological

and conceptual concerns (Demaj and Summermatter

2012 ; Moynihan 2013 ; Nielsen and Baekgaard

2013 ). With respect to methods, these authors claim

that studies based on broad correlations between

information provision and budget appropriations

and studies that rely on legislators’ self-reported

information use are unlikely to provide answers to

the behavioral question at the heart of performance

budgeting, that is, whether and how information

influences legislators’ allocation decisions. From a

conceptual perspective, most recent research holds

that previous works failed to systematically account

for the contextual variables that are known to

influence the impact that information has on people ’ s

judgments. Contextual variables shape the way people

perceive the available evidence and alter the impact

of the very same information on decision outcomes

(Wilson 2006 ). Overall, the problem encountered

in current research is that these types of studies are