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PublicationWhy do Legislators pay Attention to Policy Information? : An Eye-Tracking Experiment with Legislators( 2014-09-09)
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PublicationDo Politicians Matter in Public Sector Management Reform? : Or, What Room to Maneuver Do Public Manageres Have?(IRSPM, 2010-04-06)This paper aims at mapping public managers' substantial influence on administrative reforms as a consequence of politicians' missing demand for influence. Since any major public sector management reform is closely linked with changes in the corresponding regulation, we essentially focus on legislative-executive relations and, in particular, on the influence parliamentarians exert on the respective bill. The introduction of a 'New Accounting Model' at the national level of the Swiss federal administration and the total revision of the Financial Budget Act serve as objects of in-depth study. Based on the tradition of policy-oriented legislative research the underlying assumption of the analysis is that parliamentarians' influence on legislation varies according to the content of a specific policy. In order to disclose legislators' rationale to intervene in some aspects of the Financial Budget Act while being indifferent towards other regulations, a content analysis of the parliamentary debate over the draft bill is conducted. By matching every statement with the topic(s) addressed an unbiased picture of the debate is obtained. In addition, the amount of statements devoted to a theme makes it possible to highlight 'debate dominating topics' and infer an issue's relevance for parliamentarians. The analysis shows that topics related to the cornerstones of the reform were of low relevance to legislators. Instead, debate dominating topics inhered politically contestable issues. This, in turn, suggests that public managers enjoy substantial freedom of action concerning managerial realms due to politicians' missing demand for it
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PublicationWie nutzen ParlamentarierInnen den Integrierten Aufgaben- und Finanzplan?(IMP-HSG, 2011-12)
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PublicationWhat Can Performance Information Do to Legislator? : A Small group Budget Decision Making Experiment with Swiss State Legislators( 2014-09-08)Existing studies on the influence of performance information on budgeting decisions are limited and have produced contradictory findings. This paper argues that most previous work has somewhat problematically focused on self-reported use of performance information rather than on the legislative context into which performance information is introduced. This study offers a framework that links performance information to legislators' budgeting decisions. I argue that the impact will differ depending on whether performance information is reflected in the budget proposal, whether the allocation issue concerns a politically difficult value tradeoff for the decision-maker, and whether the implications of the performance information fall into a receptive partisan mind. This paper studies these aspects by manipulating the first two of these factors in an experimental setting involving budgetary decision-making by 57 actual legislators. The control groups consist of 65 undergraduate students. The results show that the introduction of performance information into the legislators' deliberation process leads to stronger deviations from the status quo allo-cation. I argue that this difference occurs because performance information highlights more clearly the expected consequences of budgetary changes and allows for more pronounced reactions. This paper concludes that more informed decisions based on good performance budgets might also create a situation in which it is more difficult for legislators to compromise because individual positions become more polarized.
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PublicationWhat Should We Know About Politicians' Performance Information Need and Use?(International Public Management Network, 2012-10-31)The question of legislators' use of performance information is crucial, since - among others purposes - data on outputs and outcomes is meant to inform about the performance of public managers, programs as well as organizations, and ultimately to influence the allocation of financial means. Limited empirical evidence on parliamentarians' performance information behavior provides contradictory findings with respect to the extent to which this new kind of data is used. This paper aims to draw an outline of the insights we have about politicians' information need and use in general. It sets a particular focus on the question of how the use of performance information by politicians could be analyzed more systematically in the future by referring to conceptual treatments of earlier periods or allied disciplines. We show how future research could profit by shifting the focus of analysis from the isolated analysis of performance information to the context-bounded politician and her information needs, by considering the political rationale with respect to the information-decision nexus, and by including possibilities of symbolic or strategic types of performance information utilization. Conceiving politicians as need-driven and goal-oriented information users requires a different definition of what data inform about performance. [http://www1.imp.unisg.ch/org/idt/ipmr.nsf/ IPMR]
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