Christopher Hood

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Politics and International Relations

Why do frequently‐criticised input controls survive in the management of public spending while apparently more enlightened output/outcome controls come and go? The question matters, because output/outcome controls are often assumed in Public Financial Management and related literature to lead to superior policy performance as compared with input‐fo...

Goodhart’s Law, originally inspired by money-supply indicators, predicts high-consequence administrative numbers tend to be gamed out of meaningfulness. This paper argues that, in addition to the well-documented manipulation of aggregate input numbers at the top-levels of decision making and performance indicators used for output control at the low...

This chapter explores discretion from a blame-avoidance perspective, focusing on the idea that there is a trade-off between discretion—defined as the ability or duty to exercise judgement—and blame avoidance. It argues that the idea of such a trade-off is plausible up to a point, but that it is limited in at least two ways. One is that there are so...

Extensive research has produced many insights into the dynamics of performance management systems. Spreading these complex insights among students and practitioners can be a daunting task. Gathering new insights can be equally challenging. This article introduces a novel tool for teaching and researching performance management, reporting on the des...

Despite decades of research, we still need more long-term evidence of the effects of New Public Management (NPM) and accompanying changes in government over a generation. Looking at UK experience, a key case in NPM and digital-age developments, this paper evaluates administrative data to show what happened to indicators of fairness and consistency...

Using the example of a governance system that allocates public funding for research on the basis of rankings of research quality and impact (as has been developed in the UK over the past three decades), this paper explores three conditions needed for such rankings to be effective as a basis for genuine performance improvement over time. First, the...

Building on blame-avoidance analysis, this paper develops a method to assess the reactivity, sequencing and efficacy of defensive responses by officeholders facing a crisis of personal blame, analysing cases drawn from four advanced democracies. It tests the hypotheses that officeholders: (i) react by positive action rather than non-engagement when...

Tools or instruments-based approaches, with their promise to break down the abstract complexity of the policy concept, have a long history in the study of public policy. This chapter outlines the main variants of the tools approach, showing how they range from looking inside government to identify different institutional forms as tools to treating...

UK central government is said to have been one of the most prolific reformers of its public administration over the past few decades, a poster-child of 'New Public Management'. Successive reforms were accompanied by lofty claims that the changes would transform the way government worked. Government would become more efficient (delivering services m...

This chapter offers a systematic quantitative comparison of the nine country cases examined in the book. It uses reported spending and tax data to compare the depth and duration of those squeezes, and to show how far depth and duration vary according to whether squeeze is measured by tax and spending in constant prices or relative to GDP, and wheth...

The UK ‘Geddes Axe’ initiated under the Lloyd George coalition government in the 1920s became a byword for spending cuts in a slump. It comprised the largest expenditure squeeze in the UK between 1900 and 2013 except for demobilisation periods after the two World Wars. This chapter shows that the immediate trigger for the fiscal squeeze was a tax r...

This chapter conceives ‘fiscal squeeze’ as political effort to correct the public finances by raising taxes or cutting spending (or both), distinguishing different types of squeeze. It poses three questions about such squeezes, namely whether there is something special about the politics of austerity or retrenchment, whether fiscal squeeze presents...

This chapter examines what nine cases of fiscal squeeze in different democracies can reveal about the politics of austerity, combining overall quantitative comparisons with a set of qualitative accounts of those nine cases. It argues that fiscal squeeze in democracies is not invariably prompted by economic force majeure, contrary to the view that p...

Educational performance rankings elicit extensive press coverage and varied political responses. To investigate how the negativity of press coverage was related to the rankings results and political response, we compared the domestic press coverage of two educational rankings (the 2006 editions of the OECD's Progress in Student Achievement (PISA) a...

New Public Management (NPM), particularly in its early stages in the 1980s, is often said to have concentrated on cost-cutting and efficiency, but few studies have examined how far NPM succeeded in cutting costs. Focusing on UK central government, often claimed to be a leading case of NPM, and analyzing three sets of data (for running costs, tax co...

Some online health information and services have the potential to mislead, confuse or create unnecessary anxiety and more should be done to help people find trustworthy health websites and use online health services safely and effectively, says a new report on the ethics of ‘personalised healthcare’ (Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2010). In Septemb...

"Public management by numbers" has experienced an international policy boom in recent decades, and big claims have been made about its performance-enhancing effects. But it is hard to assess such claims systematically, even though we can find dramatic anecdotes of cases in which management by numbers seems to have had performance-weakening as well...

This chapter discusses three possible interpretations of the development of British Public Administration over the twentieth century as a way of assessing its contribution to political science. Those interpretations are respectively labelled 'dodo', 'phoenix', and 'chameleon'. The 'dodo' interpretation is a pessimistic fin de siècle view of British...

'Transparency' is widely canvassed as a key to better governance, increasing trust in public-office holders. But it is more often preached than practised, more often referred to than defined, and more often advocated than critically analysed. This book exposes this doctrine to critical scrutiny from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including p...

This article focuses on Public Service Bargains (PSBs) in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world in an age of austerity and makes four main claims. First, both logic and recent history suggest that states can respond to financial crises in more than one way. Second, we argue that the pressures on existing PSBs are n...

Some online health information and services have the potential to mislead, confuse or create unnecessary anxiety and more should be done to help people find trustworthy health websites and use online health services safely and effectively, says a new report on the ethics of 'personalised healthcare' (Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2010). In Septemb...

Some online health information and services have the potential to mislead, confuse or create unnecessary anxiety and more should be done to help people find trustworthy health websites and use online health services safely and effectively, says a new report on the ethics of 'personalised healthcare' (Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2010). In Septemb...

This paper assesses what happened to academic public administration (PA) in Britain in the 2000s in the light of Rod Rhodes' gloomy prognostications about the future of the subject in the late 1990s. It argues that British PA had such a good decade in the 2000s, in funding, output, academic-practitioner interaction and institutional developments, t...

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. InThe Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a di...

Regulation is a word that has gained a wide currency in discussions of public sector reform over the past thirty years or so. Many have claimed that increased formal regulation of public sector activity reflects deep-seated 'modernist' changes in the functioning of state machinery. This article scrutinises regulation within government. To put the m...

This paper contrasts three possible ways of thinking about the relationship between accountability and transparency as principles of governance: as ‘Siamese twins’, not really distinguishable; as ‘matching parts’ that are separable but nevertheless complement one another smoothly to produce good governance; and as ‘awkward couple’, involving elemen...

The idea of administrative limits—in the sense of constraints or bounds on what can be achieved by the activity of administration in general and public administration in particular—is important for a proper understanding of twenty-first-century public administration. What are the effective limits of taxable capacity in the modern state, as debt-rid...

Assuming elected politicians have some incentive to adopt public service management systems that will help secure their reelection, this article tests 11 hypotheses about political payoffs to incumbents from ambitious performance target systems. The data come from central performance targets for health and education in Great Britain in the early 20...

This chapter begins by presenting the rationale behind the writing of this book. It then discusses the meanings of 'modern', 'modernity', 'modernization', and 'modernism'; the notion of unintended effects of human action, and the lessons that can we can learn from examining paradoxes of modernization in public services.

This chapter asks three kinds of questions about the risks of unanticipated and unintended consequences arising from modernizing reforms. How do we understand and classify these risks? How should we best explain these outcomes, when they do arise? And can our explanations suggest anything important of a prescriptive character about how policy-maker...

This book explores the unintended and unanticipated effects associated with 'modernization' projects and tackles the key question that they provoke: Why do policy-makers persist in such enterprises in the face of evidence that they tend to fail? The book first discusses what is meant by 'modernization' and 'unintended consequences', placing public...

This article examines the responses of ministers facing high levels of blame in the press after serious failures in the public exam system for school-leavers in Scotland in 2000 and England in 2002. It develops a method for systematic analysis and comparison of the behaviour of officeholders facing blame, tests the hypothesis that ministers will ac...

This article starts by looking at the now familiar idea of ‘New Public Management’ in the light of previous efforts at managerial reform, arguing that NPM has proved a fairly durable and consistent agenda. Then the major criticisms of NPM within and outside the public service are reviewed, demonstrating the tensions and contradictions among the maj...

We can perhaps imagine a world in which risks could be managed without consideration of blame. But any such world exists mainly in the imagination, in a society free from law, politics or even ordinary human psychology. To understand the management of risk, we need to understand how it is shaped by blame and blame avoidance. So this paper aims to d...

This article studies the various tools of government in the Information Age. It identifies the three conventional approaches of the tools of government analysis: conceiving instruments as institutions, focusing on the politics of instrument selection, and cataloguing the tool kit in a more generic way than on the politics of instrument choice. It e...

Though authors vary in the detailed definitions of the term "public management" that they offer, most of the standard definitions of public management amount to some variant on "the study and practice of design and operation of arrangements for the provision of public services and executive government," while management itself is conventionally def...

This paper documents the growth of international rankings of governance and public services and seeks to contribute to a second-generation approach to the analysis of this phenomenon. It does so primarily by setting out a method for ranking international ratings, building on and extending earlier work by other scholars, and applies that method to 1...

Since the term ‘contract state’ was coined over 20 years ago, there has been much discussion about the scope and limits of outsourcing and contractorisation. But attempts to fix the limits of outsourceability, using approaches such as transaction-cost analysis, the identification of inherently state functions and business-strategy ideas of ‘core co...

GoodinRobert (ed) The Theory of Institutional Design, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0521471192 £35, $49.95. - Volume 16 Issue 2 - Christopher Hood

This article explores what happens when the much-discussed doctrine of transparency as a key to good governance meets the widely observed behavioural tendency of blame-avoidance in politics and public administration. It begins by discussing transparency as an idea and distinguishing different strains of the doctrine, proceeds to discuss blame-avoid...

Tax law enforcement in the UK has long been dominated by public bureaucracies of the ‘classic’ type. This article reviews some current problems of tax law enforcement in that style, and looks at some possible ways of mitigating those problems. These include a change in penalty schedules and some measure of ‘re-privatization’ of tax law enforcement,...

This article briefly examines five subfields of the public administration literature in the context of the major changes which have occurred in each of those fields since the 1940s. Major changes include: the alleged shift to‘globalization’affecting comparative public administration; the spread of‘economic rationalism’in policy analysis; the new wa...

Between 1971 and 1984 there were ten cases of merger or demerger in British central government departments, ranging in importance from the massive DTI demerger into four distinct departments (1973) to the absorption by the Lord Chancellor's Department of the Office of the Public Trustee (1982). By analysis of changes in aggregate indices of ‘top st...

‘Using bureaucracy sparingly’ (UBS) is a well-known and traditional canon of good public administration — but one that has a number of meanings which are not wholly compatible with one another. Looking at the interface between government administration and the outside public (rather than at the internal operations of government bureaux), this essay...

Studies a number of aspects of the reform of public finance and public management in France (LOLF), with special attention to science and technology policy, using a pragmatist approach to the sociology of the state.

This article reflects on the mixture of ideology, technological change, and interests that have made government instrumentalities central to the analysis of public policy over the two decades since the publication of the author’s Tools of Government in 1983, and distinguishes three main strains of analysis of policy instruments: analytic approaches...

The nature and level of rewards to politicians is an important issue in public management. It receives little theoretical attention in academic political science today, although it offers the basis of a Popperian ‘crucial experiment’ for testing the explanatory claims of the rent-seeking rational choice model of politics. This paper discusses the e...

British government‘growth’in the recent past has not been reflected in a growing civil service. Bureaucratic expansion has largely taken place in local authorities and in central non-Departmental bodies. Explaining growth in the second area requires an explanation of why government agencies should be constituted in one form rather than another, and...

Transparency is a term that has attained quasi-religious significance in debate over governance and institutional design. Today, it is pervasive in the jargon of business governance as well as that of governments and international bodies, and has been used almost to saturation point in all of those domains over the past decade. This chapter maps ou...

This concluding chapter explores four issues. First, what have we learned about transparency and how has it changed? Second, what seems to affect transparency - what accounts for growth or decline in the phenomenon? Third, what does transparency itself affect - what does it do to organizations or to society more generally? Last, what normative view...

In the 2000s, governments in the UK, particularly in England, developed a system of governance of public services that combined targets with an element of terror. This has obvious parallels with the Soviet regime, which was initially successful but then collapsed. Assumptions underlying governance by targets represent synecdoche (taking a part to s...

To what extent did the extensive system of managing public services by targets, introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the United Kingdom in 1998, reproduce the classic gaming responses associated with the Soviet Union and other centralized performance-setting systems? Combining evidence from documentary sources and interviews with hig...

The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal a...

The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal a...