Look for the Silver Lining: When Performance-Based Accountability Systems Work

In advancing improved accountability and performance, governments have relied upon one or more of the following approaches: political accountability or improved responsiveness to political direction, legal accountability or contract accountability, and performance-based accountability. This article examines the major approach to the last, managing for results (MFR), in the context of the American states. All state governments seek to improve decision making by employing MFR models but with clear differences in the degree of quality. States regarded as having strong MFR systems devote energy to integrative facilitators: practical actions that ensure that the links between components of the MFR system connect, provide quality performance information, and facilitate information exchange and utilization. The facilitators identified are the comprehensiveness of the MFR system, vertical integration of goals, strong strategic guidance for agency efforts, balance between bottom-up and top-down approaches, and leadership and political commitment. Reforms intended to create results-based government and management have been frequent and widespread in the United States and elsewhere for the past decade. Managing for results (MFR), many have argued, will not only increase overall performance levels but also contribute to improved accountability of public organizations to elected officials and citizens (Behn 2001). This article examines MFR reform in all fifty United States, based on analyses in two time periods, 1998 and 2000. Using a criteria-based approach to evaluate and rank MFR systems, this article seeks to uncover the common management factors that enable governments to meet the criteria for effective MFR. This means that we identify states that did well and poorly according to the criteria and we explore in some depth why they achieved or failed to achieve the criteria, first reviewing important governance variables and then describing the common management practices of states that performed well. We call these management practices integrative facilitators, the practical actions that ensure that systems work as theorized: creating, disseminating, and using valid performance information. The concepts discussed in this article treat MFR as a capacity tool, reflecting an advance from early efforts to establish performance accountability based on measurement of government outputs (ICMA 2000). Although precise measurement offers many benefits,