Oliver James

• BA, MSc, PhD (LSE, London)
• Professor at University of Exeter

Although performance information is widely promoted to improve the accountability of public service provision, behavioral research has revealed that motivated reasoning leads recipients to update their beliefs inaccurately. However, the reasoning processes of service users have been largely neglected. We develop a theory of public service users’ mo...

Theories of blame suggest that the institutional design of public service delivery affects citizens' blame of politicians for service failure, and that delegation or contracting out reducing citizens' blame of politicians. We replicate experimentally James et al.'s blame study to assess whether the findings still apply in the original, Western cont...

The reality of street-level discretion can entail discrimination against people based on their identifiable characteristics. However, there has been surprisingly little systematic assessment of empirical evidence about what can be done to tackle the problem. This paper systematically reviews empirical behavioural research studies (N = 53) on the ef...

Understanding differences between working in the public and private sectors is core to public management research. We assess the implications of a theory of public ownership, testing an expectation that work is of higher quality when performed under public ownership status compared to a private company. We conducted two, pre-registered, field exper...

Objective To identify the key individual-level (demographics, attitudes, mobility) and contextual (COVID-19 case numbers, tiers of mobility restrictions, urban districts) determinants of adopting the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app and continued use overtime. Design and setting A three-wave panel survey conducted in England in July 2020 (backgrou...

One of the greatest achievements of the EU is the freedom of movement between member states offering citizens equal rights in EU member states. EU enlargement and the COVID-19 pandemic allow for a critical test of whether EU citizens are indeed treated equally in practice. We test preferential treatment of EU citizens in two hypothetical choice exp...

Objective To identify the key individual-level (demographics, attitudes, mobility) and contextual (Covid-19 case numbers, tiers of mobility restrictions, urban districts) determinants of adopting the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app and continued use over-time. Design and setting A three-wave panel survey conducted in England in July 2020 (backgro...

Recommended reporting guidance for experiments in public management and related research.

EU citizens have rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination undermines the operation of these rights. We go beyond extant research on bureaucratic discrimination in two ways. First, we move beyond considering mobile EU citizens as homogenous immigrant minority to assess whether EU citizens from certain co...

Dissatisfied users of public services may choose to voice or exit. But when does voice emerge? To answer this question, we deploy Hirschman's (1970) exit, voice, and loyalty (EVL) model. We set out an 'available alternatives' hypothesisincreasing the number of exit options reduces voicein contrast to an 'effective voice' hypothesis where voice is...

The heart of public management is that the public sector context matters in ways that generic management research typically neglects. Generic management scholarship has found that the degree of match between top managers’ career experience and the characteristics of their current organizations creates managerial fit or misfit. However, public secto...

Citizens’ concerns about data privacy and data security breaches may reduce adoption of COVID-19 contact tracing mobile phone applications, making them less effective. We implement a choice experiment (conjoint experiment) where participants indicate which version of two contact tracing apps they would install, varying the apps’ privacy-preserving...

Performance information can facilitate user choice of public services and enhance accountability. However, the public sector’s multiple performance dimensions create a potential for order effects on users’ responses to information arising from the sequence of information reporting. We assess order effects using a randomized survey experiment. In a...

A revolution in the measurement and reporting of government performance through the use of published metrics, rankings and reports has swept the globe at all levels of government. Performance metrics now inform important decisions by politicians, public managers and citizens. However, this performance movement has neglected a second revolution in b...

Public services that are tax funded, public goods are sometimes marketised by being delivered using private companies instead of public organisations. Additionally, marketisation reforms can entail service users being described as customers for the service rather than as citizens. We assess the effects of these aspects of marketisation reforms on u...

Recent years have seen an increase in choice of provider in many public services, including education. Proponents of provider choice suggest it increases users' satisfaction. However, insights from the psychology of choice overload suggest that too much choice can be detrimental. We use a survey experiment to investigate the effect of provider choi...

Recent studies find motivated reasoning in citizens' processing of information about public performance. Using experiments in the US and Denmark, we examine effects on an accuracy-based task of two forms of motivated reasoning: partisan identity-based reasoning and reasoning from ideology-based governance preferences (favoring either the public or...

Many official statistics reported to the public appear in the form of rates, such as crimes or diseases per 100,000 people, with the choice of a base number (for example per 1,000,000, per 100,000, or per 1,000) remaining largely a matter of the choices or traditions of statistical agencies. Because prior studies have shown that people tend to judg...

Recent studies find motivated reasoning in citizens’ processing of information about public performance. Using experiments in the US and Denmark, we examine effects on an accuracy-based task of two forms of motivated reasoning: partisan identity-based reasoning and reasoning from ideology-based governance preferences (favoring either the public or...

Endorsement is used by charitable organizations to stimulate public support, including monetary donations. This article reports a field experiment that examined the effect of leader and peer endorsement on student volunteering. The experiment was conducted with over 100,000 students from five UK universities and compared the effect on volunteering...

Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated...

This article addresses important questions about the complex construct of underlying performance information use: public service performance. A between-subjects experimental vignette methodology was implemented to answer questions about the effects of emphasizing different dimensions of performance and the sources and types of performance informati...

Research indicates that providing social information about other people’s charitable donations can increase individual contributions. However, the effects of social information on volunteering time are underexplored. In this field experiment, we measure the effects of different levels of feedback about other people’s time contributions (very high,...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

This article introduces the symposium on the emerging subfield of behavioural public administration. The nine articles of the symposium each combine a focus on behavioural theory with the use of experiments as the method for testing theoretical expectations. The contribution of this work to public administration theory is revealed in the expanding...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Field experiments are typically differentiated from conventional laboratory experiments on several dimensions: the use of relevant subjects participating in the experiment (as opposed to student subjects), the authenticity rather than the abstract nature of treatments, the realism rather than abstraction of the context of the experiment and the rea...

International organizations are an alternative to national governments as a source of information for citizens about governments’ performance. Experiments about high UK e-government performance reported in an international ranking find a United Nations (UN) source increases citizens’ perceptions of the truthfulness of reported performance and incre...

Replication is increasingly recognized as an important part of knowledge production in the social sciences, especially for experimental research. However, despite growing use of experiments, replication is little discussed or practiced in public management. We review the approach to replication taken by research in leading public management journal...

There are a number of influences on how long an agency head serves. The importance of particular influences in turn depends on the prospective destination of the agency head: elsewhere in the public sector; the private sector; or retirement. We estimate survival models of agency heads’ tenure using panel data on British central government executive...

Regulatory reforms across European countries have attempted to increase consumer welfare by introducing competition and choice into public service markets. But it has been questioned whether reforms have benefitted all people equally, suggesting that vulnerable groups of service users are worse-off in the provision of services. We assess the relati...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

This chapter introduces key concepts in causal inference, with a focus on the design and analysis of experiments. It is principally aimed at readers who do not have formal training or extensive experience in experimentation but who want to get the most out of the chapters in this volume, critically interpret experimental studies and their findings,...

Public performance reporting is often promoted as a means to better inform citizens? judgments of public services. However, political psychology has found evidence of motivated reasoning, with citizens? accuracy motives often supplanted by biased searching for and evaluation of information to defend prior political attitudes, beliefs or identities....

Replications of experiments are typically conducted to verify initial findings, increase their external validity, or to study the boundary conditions of treatment effects. A crucial and implicitly made assumption is that outcome measures in experiments are sufficiently comparable (i.e., equivalent) across experimental settings. We argue that there...

In this virtual issue, we bring together a collection of research articles that—although not usually grouped together—all illustrate the importance of citizen-state interactions. Specifically, we include articles that directly incorporate citizens’ perceptions, attitudes, experiences of, or behavior related to public administration. About 10% of al...

Theories of blame suggest that contracting out public service delivery reduces citizens’ blame of politicians for service failure. The authors use an online experiment with 1,000 citizen participants to estimate the effects of information cues summarizing service delivery arrangements on citizens’ blame of English local government politicians for p...

Shared performance targets for the horizontal coordination of public organizations : control theory and departmentalism in the United Kingdom’s Public Service Agreement system Coordinating organizations horizontally is a longstanding difficulty of public governance, often called departmentalism in central government systems. Several tools for horiz...

Coordinating organizations horizontally is a longstanding difficulty of public governance, often called departmentalism in central government systems. Several tools for horizontal coordination have previously been analysed but shared performance targets across departments have received relatively little attention. This article develops a control th...

Initiatives to boost public trust of government often rely on better reporting of the efforts and accomplishments of government agencies. But if citizens disbelieve the performance reports of agencies, especially information about good performance, then these initiatives may be do little to enhance trust. We ask the following questions: Do citizens...

Coordination is a long-term policy issue in the UK government (Pollitt, 2003; Bogdanor, 2005). The concept implies a need to bring policies, organizations and related practices into alignment to achieve goals. In the context of public policy in the UK territorial nation state, the central government and its strategic centre, known as the core execu...

This article extends the theory of government agency survival from separation of powers to parliamentary government systems. It evaluates expectations of increased risk to agencies following transitions in government, prime minister or departmental minister, and from incongruence between the originally establishing and currently overseeing politica...

Regulatory reforms across European countries have attempted to increase consumer welfare by introducing competition and choice into public service markets. But it has been questioned whether reforms have benefitted all people equally, suggesting that vulnerable groups of service users are worse-off in the provision of services. We assess the relati...

We evaluate a theory of the effects of publishing performance information on citizens' collective voice to local providers about public service performance and the perceptions and attitudes that influence their voice. Field experiments show that information about low absolute and relative performance of local government household waste recycling se...

The contemporary literature on governance notes the difficulties that core executives, central points for steering and co-ordinating public activity, have in undertaking this strategic function. The UK core executive, particularly the Treasury, has developed a regime of Public Service Agreements (PSAs) as a novel and ambitious tool of governance, p...

We extend the theory of government agency survival from separation of powers to parliamentary government systems. We suggest that agencies are at increased risk following a transition in government, prime minister, or departmental minister and in cases where the actors in the political executive overseeing an agency are different to those establish...

We develop a theory of the effect of top management succession on the performance of public organizations. The theory is rooted in the fundamental characteristics of an organization’s publicness: ownership, funding, and regulation. We construct the concept of publicness fit—the match between the organization and the leader’s previous managerial exp...

The landscape of the UK public sector is densely populated with semi-autonomous agencies. A recent review counted 1148 semi-autonomous public bodies connected to UK central government or the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (Farrugia and O’Connell 2008). The bodies are of different formal institutional types and incl...

The ‘Anglo-American’ countries analysed by these chapters share an English language culture, and history of ties with the United Kingdom, although their experiences vary considerably. Within the set, the Westminster-based systems of the UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand share the strongest institutional similarities, such as parliamentary syst...

Citizens' expectations of public service performance influence their attitudes and behaviour towards services, including satisfaction, choice of service and political voice about them. However, there has been little research on what sets expectations. This paper assesses the effects of prior service performance and information about prior performan...

When do new chief executives in the public sector make a difference to organizational performance? Theory suggests that executive succession has both adaptive and disruptive effects on public organizations, and the balance between these is likely to depend on the performance of the organization in the period before a new top manager takes office. W...

A crucial test of whether “management matters” is whether changes in the team at the top of an organization make a difference. Focusing on turnover in the collective senior team rather than successions of individual chief executives, this article argues that the impact of leadership succession is contingent upon prior organizational performance. Th...

There has been a massive expansion in published information about the performance of bodies delivering public services but little research about the effects on citizens. Research on information and political participation suggests that information cues allow citizens to economize on the need for full information, influencing their perceptions and a...

There is a long controversy about the extent to which left and right parties determine the content of public policies, which is mainly limited to analyses of expenditures or policy programmes. As an extension to this work, we assess party effects on other policy outcomes that matter for citizens - the performance of public services. We examine a po...

Introduction There is relatively little research that systematically assesses how changes in political or managerial leadership contribute to public service performance, and even less on the question of how the effectiveness of these leaders is related to their use of performance information. This gap in knowledge is surprising because the idea tha...

Political and organizational theories suggest that the turnover of chief executives and other members of senior management teams are likely to be influenced by public service performance. We use a panel data set of 148 English local governments over 4 years to test this proposition. The empirical results show that performance has a negative effect...

This chapter examines the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) regime in English local government, a scheme introduced in the early 2000s to improve performance across local authorities. A paradox lies in the fact that even though the CPA was a classical performance management system, overall it was a success, whereas most other performance m...

In many political systems the political neutrality of senior managers’ tenure is often cherished as a key part of the politics-administration dichotomy and is subject to formal safeguards. We test hypotheses about the impact of political change on senior management turnover drawn from political science, public administration and private sector mana...

Systems for assessing the comparative performance of organizations providing public services are increasingly apparent across service sectors and jurisdictions. This article sets out an agenda of research themes about these systems.The themes include the performance concepts and measures adopted, purposes of systems (with variation from information...

The link between government performance and support for incumbents is a key mechanism of accountable government. We model the vote share of incumbent administrations in local government as proportional and nonproportional responses to public service performance. We evaluate the models using a panel data set covering performance and elections from 2...

Expectations disconfirmation and expectations anchoring are two increasingly influential approaches to understanding individuals' satisfaction and dissatisfaction with public services. This article assesses hypotheses from these approaches for two local public services in England provided by local authorities: overall public services from the autho...

Much of the discussion of state steering of service delivery networks to encourage collaboration at the local level has been theoretical. This study builds on this analysis systematically to assess the relationship between meta-governance tools of central government steering and the extent of local collaboration, using the case of homelessness serv...

This article summarises the results of a ‘broad brush’ global survey of ‘new forms' of public management. The survey supports the view that the spread of the new forms cannot be seen as a global ‘paradigm shift’ in public management. However the new forms are increasingly found beyond the core set of OECD countries usually given as examples of refo...

© 2007 by SAGE Publications and PAC Principal-agent modelling has become a very influential way of thinking about bureaucratic politics in a wide range of settings. Simple agency models have recently been extended and bureaucratic relationships placed in their wider temporal and socio-political contexts. By developing a conceptualization of princip...

The Next Steps reform is a major reorganization of the British central state which has occurred rapidly since 1988. Existing explanations of the reform largely accept the official interpretation that it was a natural development of the earlier Financial Management Initiative. However, Next Steps is radically different involving passing responsibili...

ABSTRACT Publishing performance information about local public services, an increasing trend in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, matters politically be- cause it has an effect on incumbent,local governments’,electoral support. Voters are able to use performance,information,to punish,or reward,incumbents,in the...

The ‘new public management’ (NPM) promised a revolution in the way executive politicians control public services. This article looks at the effects of NPM forns on political control, especially ‘arms-length’ executive agencies, contracting with private firms and performance measurement in the prisons domain. These reforms promised politicians strat...

Governments not only regulate business and society but also themselves in the form of regulation of publicly owned and/or funded bodies. Regulation of the public sector involves regulators operating at arms-length from those they regulate using systems of standard setting, monitoring and enforcement. In the past three decades in the UK, regulation...

Governments not only regulate business and society but also themselves in the form of regulation of publicly owned and/or funded bodies. Regulation of the public sector involves regulators operating at arms-length from those they regulate using systems of standard setting, monitoring and enforcement. In the past three decades in the UK, regulation...

This book takes the comparative study of regulation to a new level. Working with contributions across three domains by a number of national experts, the authors weave a dazzling account of the rich variety of oversight mechanisms in public services and central government. The book provides not only detailed cross-national empirical analysis but als...

This article reviews three recent books that explore the social and political foundations of the regulatory changes in the governance of British society and economy. Beyond privatization, there is increasing delegation to autonomous agencies, formalization of relationships, and proliferation of new technologies of regulation in both public and priv...

The contemporary literature on governance notes the difficulties that core executives, central points for steering and co-ordinating public activity, have in undertaking this strategic function. The UK core executive, particularly the Treasury, has developed a regime of Public Service Agreements (PSAs) as a novel and ambitious tool of governance, p...

In a recent article in this Journal Marsh, Smith and Richards (MSR) note the massive recent changes in the organization of British government and the attention the bureau-shaping model has received both at a theoretical level and as an explanation of changes. 1 They suggest that the model has breathed new life into debates about the behaviour of of...

The concepts of ‘lesson drawing’ and ‘policy transfer’ have become increasingly influential ways of understanding public policy, especially in the UK. However, the main proponents of the concepts, Rose for ‘lesson drawing’ and Dolowitz and Marsh for ‘policy transfer’, have difficulty in providing convincing answers to three questions that are impor...

The two perspectives offer hypotheses about executive agency reform and the outcomes of reform including the performance of individual executive agencies and central government systemic performance. Section 1 sets out the public interest perspective which embodies the official view contained in the Next Steps report and the Government statement acc...

The increased use of executive agencies as a way of delivering goods and services that are under the control of central government politicians is a key part of ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) reform to public services. There is now a large, international, literature using the term ‘NPM’ in a range of different ways (Barzelay, 2000). However, an influ...

The two perspectives’ hypotheses about the performance of individual executive agencies are summarised in Table 5.1. Section 1 examines the economy of executive agencies. Section 2 looks at their productive efficiency and effectiveness. Section 3 assesses the effect of executive agency structures on the performance of the Benefits Agency.

The pubic interest and bureau-shaping perspectives have contrasting hypotheses about the process of executive agency reform, summarised in Table 3.1. Section 1 examines the initiation of the reform. Section 2 explores the implementation of reform, especially in the case of the Benefits Agency. Section 3 begins an assessment of the outcome of the re...

The hypotheses of the public interest and bureau-shaping perspectives for the systemic performance of central government are summarised in Table 6.1. Section 1 assesses systemic economy. Section 2 assesses systemic productive efficiency and effectiveness. Section 3 assesses the contribution of executive agency structures in the Benefits Agency to t...

The findings from Part II suggest answers to the three questions set out in Chapter 1 and allow an overall assessment of the relative merits of the two perspectives. These answers and assessments are set out in Section 1. Section 2 draws on the perspectives and the findings to suggest ways in which the use of executive agencies may develop in the f...

A large number of bodies were set up with the two main features of the executive agency model. This chapter continues the examination of the outcome of the reform by assessing whether executive agencies’ procedures and general working practices were consistent with the model, or whether the changes were superficial. If the changes were superficial...

Regulation is normally thought of as government regulation of the private sector, particularly business. However, there is a developing literature on regulation inside government, exploring the ways in which government regulates itself through a range of bodies which set standards for public sector organizations, monitor them and seek to bring abou...