Agency Political Ideology and Reform Implementation: Performance Management in the Bush Administration

A central purpose of performance management reforms such as the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) is to promote the use of performance information in federal agencies. But reforms initiated by partisan political actors may be pursued differently, and may face relatively more obstacles, in agencies whose programs or personnel are associated with divergent political ideologies. Using data from a survey of federal agency managers, our analysis indicates that the impact of PART on managers' use of performance information is largely contingent on the political ideology of the agencies in which managers work. Managers involved with the PART review process report greater performance information use than those not involved if they work in politically moderate and, especially, conservative agencies. However, there is no such difference in liberal agencies between those involved and those not involved with PART reviews. Supplementary analyses provide some evidence that these results are attributable to the PART review process itself, as opposed to inherent differences in the extent to which programs administered by liberal and conservative agencies lend themselves to performance management.