Institutional isomorphism, negativity bias and performance information use by politicians: A survey experiment

By B. George, Martin Baekgaard, Adelien Decramer, Mieke Audenaert, Stijn Goeminne. Public Administration, 2020

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New Public Management popularized performance measurement (PM) in public organizations. Underlying PM’s popularity, is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision-making thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite PM’s popularity, it is criticized. In part, this criticism results from the limited knowledge on why PI is used by politicians. We conduct a survey experiment based on real PI with 1.210 politicians. We hypothesize that PI has a positive impact on performance information use (PIU) when PI is benchmarked with a coercive, mimetic or normative institutional pressure. Moreover, we expect this positive impact to be stronger when PI is negative. We find that coercive and normative pressures indeed have a positive impact on intended PIU but only normative pressures have a positive impact on actual PIU. Moreover, mimetic pressures have a positive impact on actual PIU but only when PI is negative. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f79c6e01c6bc33235546eb6cbc5b3c9873eb79e