ANALYSING PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT IN PUBLIC SERVICES: HOW USEFUL IS THE CONCEPT OF A PERFORMANCE REGIME?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12206 |
| Author | JAMES DOWNE,STEVE MARTIN,SANDRA NUTLEY,CLIVE GRACE |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12206
ANALYSING PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT IN PUBLIC
SERVICES: HOW USEFUL IS THE CONCEPT OF A
PERFORMANCE REGIME?
STEVE MARTIN, SANDRA NUTLEY, JAMES DOWNE
AND CLIVE GRACE
Approaches to performance assessment have been described as ‘performance regimes’, but there
has been little analysis of what is meant by this concept and whether it has any real value. Wedraw
on four perspectives on regimes – ‘institutions and instruments’, ‘risk regulation regimes’, ‘internal
logics and effects’ and ‘analytics of government’ – to explore how the concept of a multi-dimensional
regime can be applied to performance assessment in public services. We conclude that the concept
is valuable. It helps to frame comparative and longitudinal analyses of approaches to performance
assessment and draws attention to the ways in which public service performance regimes operate
at different levels, how they change over time and what drives their development. Areas for future
research include analysis of the impacts of performance regimes and interactions between their visi-
ble features (such as inspections, performance indicators and star ratings) and the veiled rationalities
which underpin them.
INTRODUCTION
How closely, in what ways and by whom the performance of public sector organizations
should be assessed is a topic that has been hotly debated by scholars of public administra-
tion as well as policy-makers and practitioners (Van Dooren et al. 2010). In recent years,
these questions have been accompanied by a growing concern about how to improve
public service performance. A range of approaches to performance assessment have been
adopted at different times, in different services and across differentjurisdictions, and dur-
ing the past decade a number of scholars have described these as ‘performance regimes’
(Roper et al. 2005; Grubnic and Woods 2009; Moynihan 2009; Moynihan et al. 2011; Char-
bonneau and Bellavance 2012). However, they have used the concept of a ‘regime’ in a
general sense rather than as an analytical tool. What constitutes a performance regime – its
distinguishing features and dimensions – has not been entirely clear.
The concept of a regime has been employed in several elds, including international
relations, international law,urban policy and political science, to analyse governance pro-
cesses at international, national and local levels, and regime theory has been applied to
particular aspects of governance, including policy problems (Mays and Jochim 2013) and
risk regulation (Hood et al. 2001). A common thread running through the application of the
concept of a regime in these different contexts is that it encourages an analytical approach
which explores the interactions among institutions and interest groups and ways in which
these are mediated by formal and informal rules and cultures. This has the potential to
support both comparative and longitudinal studies of governance arrangements. Stud-
ies often focus on visible interactions and espoused rationalities, but there is also a more
reexive form of regime theory – the analytics of government approach – which seeks to
Steve Martin, James Downe and Clive Grace are in Cardiff Business School, CardiffUniversity, UK; Sandra Nutley is in
the School of Management, University of St Andrews, UK.
The copyright line for this article was changed on 7 September after original online publication.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (129–145)
© 2015 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
130 STEVE MARTIN ET AL.
uncover the often hidden or invisible rationalities that sit behind particular modes of gov-
ernance (Dean 1999).
On the face of it, then, employing the concept of regimes to analyse approaches to per-
formance assessments in public sector settings should be revealing. However, there have
been very few comparative analyses of performance assessment and no attempts to apply
the concept of a regime to this task. As a result, there is an important gap in our knowl-
edge about the value of the concept in this domain. This article seeks to address the gap
by examining how the concept can be developed to advance understanding of the origins
and operation of approaches to performance assessment. It does this empirically and ana-
lytically by exploring how four perspectives on regimes can help us to understand three
recent approaches to performance assessment in UK local government.
The article addresses four specic questions. First, is a regimes perspective a useful
way of identifying and analysing differences between approaches to performance assess-
ment in public services? Second, at what level of analysis is the concept of a performance
regime most useful? Third, can it help to explain differences in approachesto performance
assessment between jurisdictions and over time? Finally, how might the concept of a per-
formance regime be developed in the future to advance our understanding of approaches
to performance assessment? In answering these questions, the article makes an important
contribution to investigating the applicability of the concept of a regime to the study of
performance assessment.
The next section focuses on four approaches to regime analysis which are particularly
relevant to the study of performance assessment in the public sector. Following this, we
explain our methods and data sources. Then we apply the concept of a performance
regime to analyse approaches to the assessment of local government performance in
England, Scotland and Wales. We describe the main characteristics of the approaches,
the interactions between the actors who developed them and the instruments that they
used. We conclude by examining our four research questions in light of this empirical
analysis, reecting on the implications of our research for the application of the concept
of performance regimes to the study of public service organizations and suggesting areas
for future research.
REGIME THEORY AND PERFORMANCE REGIMES
All of the literatures in which the concept has been adopted identify a regime as consisting
of interactions among actors (variously described as interest groups, coalitions and institu-
tions) who operate within relatively stable systems characterized by formal and informal
rules and cultures (e.g. Krasner 1982). Regimes can be forced upon actors by external cir-
cumstances, but while government actors are usually regarded as the principal architects
of regimes, they need not necessarily be mandated or imposed by a hierarchical state (Beb-
bington et al. 2012).
Debates about the usefulness of a regimes perspective in international relations and
urban studies (e.g. Strange 1982) provide insights into some of the potential benets and
limitations of applying the concept to the study of performance assessments of public ser-
vice organizations. There are, however, four specic contributions that are particularly
relevant for our development and application of the concept: Talbot’s (2010) depiction
of the institutions and instruments that make up a performance regime; the framework
developed by Hood et al. (2001) to analyse approaches to risk regulation; the analysis by
Pollitt et al. (2010) of the impact of exogenous shocks and internal logics on performance
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (129–145)
© 2015 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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