Elected Executives’ Preferences for Performance Assessment: A Survey Experiment with Colombian Mayors

ABSTRACT

Elected executives’ preferences for performance indicators when assessing their accomplishments remain scarcely researched despite their potential effects on strategic and managerial decisions. We propose credit-claiming opportunities’ perceptions affect elected executives’ preferences for performance indicators. Thus, preferences should vary with policy area and reporting government level. In a survey-experiment, we asked 243 Colombian mayors to choose their preferred indicator (cost, quantity or quality) to assess program implementation. Mayors are more likely to prefer quantity indicators (most relevant in this context) when implementing infrastructural projects, compared to educational programs that offer less credit-claiming opportunities. No statistical difference exists between monitoring/reporting levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance indicators
• local governments
• credit claiming
• survey experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We acknowledge the existence of blame avoidance literature (Weaver, 1986; Hinterleitner, 2017, Hanson 2025 among others). However, here our interest is demonstrating how politicians can exploit different credit claiming opportunities contingent on the type of performance indicator.

2. To be sure, this model is far from universal. For instance, the council-manager model, often used in local governments in the United States and Ireland (Svara, 2008), among other countries, purposely separates the political and managerial roles in local government administration.

3. Nevertheless, disagreement exists as to how to define clientelism for concept operationalization (Hicken & Nathan, 2020; Hilgers, 2008; Nichter, 2018; Rocha, 2023).

4. Except for the case of countries that are highly decentralized at the intermediate level, such as Canada.

5. FollowingRyzin and Gregg (2020), we adapted the regression analysis and performed a transformation of the treatment variables to be able to estimate the main effects.

6. The authors thank a reviewer for suggesting this interpretation.