Rational planning and politicians’ preferences for spending and reform: replication and extension of a survey experiment

ABSTRACT

The rational planning cycle of formulating strategic goals and using performance information to assess goal implementation is assumed to assist decision-making by politicians. Empirical evidence supporting this assumption is scarce. Our study replicates a Danish experiment on the relation between performance information and politicians‘ preferences for spending and reform and extends this experiment by investigating the role of strategic goals. Based on a randomized survey experiment (1.484 Flemish city councillors) and an analysis of 225 strategic plans, we found that information on low and high performance as well as strategic goals impact politicians’ preferences for spending and reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Rational planning
• strategic planning
• performance measurement
• decision-making
• survey experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2016.1210905

Notes

^1. The respondents are largely representative of the full population in terms of available observables. We found no differences between the respondents and non-respondents in terms of gender composition and age. Only members of the fairly small Green Party were significantly overrepresented in the sample (4.9 per cent compared to 3.7 per cent in the population). The primary differences between the respondents and non-respondents concern geographical representation, where the over-representation of councillors from the province of Antwerp was statistically significant, whereas councillors from the province of Flemish-Brabant and the province of Limburg were under-represented. Yet, in substantial terms these differences were of limited size. (See Table A1 in the supplemental data for further detail.) We briefly note that although the question of representativeness can warrant caution in terms of generalizability, it does not affect the causal interpretation of the findings.

^2. Examples of these articles in Dutch are available from the authors upon request.

^3. This question was placed after the treatment and the descriptive statistics reported are therefore only based on respondents in the control group. The performance level has no impact on the perception of educational capacity as an indicator of performance among these respondents.

^4. The exact vignette can be consulted in our supplemental data.

^5. The robustness checks are presented in the supplemental data.

^6. The analyses including controls are presented in the supplemental data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bert George

Bert George is finalizing his PhD in strategic management at Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Starting August 2016, Bert will be an assistant professor in public management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on the decision-making impact of strategic planning and performance measurement in public organizations, both from an observational and experimental perspective.

Sebastian Desmidt

Sebastian Desmidt is an assistant professor in strategic management at Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. His research focuses on the effectiveness of strategic management instruments, the determinants of strategic consensus and the motivational power of mission valence, and mission engagement in public and nonprofit organizations.

Poul A. Nielsen

Poul A. Nielsen is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on how performance management affects political and management decision-making, organizational learning, leadership, and performance outcomes.

Martin Baekgaard

Martin Baekgaard is an associate professor at Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. His current research interests include performance information use, performance, regimes, budgeting, and politico-administrative relations.