Collaborative Research: Effectiveness, Control and Competence in Public Agencies

本项目将加强和检验公共管理中“能力-控制”辩证法的新博弈论模型。具体来说，它将探讨如何1)政治任命的监督和干预；2)民选官员的监督和干预；3)晋升到政策制定职位的机会会影响官僚制定某些类型的政策和政策执行专业知识的倾向。作为该项目的一部分，研究小组将开发一个新的、公开的联邦机构数据库，其中包括有关政治环境、机构结构、专业知识投资和机构绩效的信息，以检验有关政治干预与机构能力之间权衡的假设。这项工作的结果将深入了解与政府机构的政治互动如何影响这些机构的专业知识、能力，并最终影响这些机构的绩效。在公共领域，这是一个至关重要的问题：民主政府必须对政治方向作出反应，然而，一个没有专业知识的政府缺乏向公民提供有效服务的能力。这些见解对非公共组织也很重要，因为主体干预和代理实现之间的权衡对于许多其他类型的组织来说很常见。

This project will enhance and test new game theoretic models of a "Competence-Control" dialectic in public administration. Specifically, it will explore how 1) supervision and intervention by political appointees; 2) supervision and intervention by elected officials; and 3) opportunities for promotion into policy making positions affect the propensities of bureaucrats to develop certain types of policy and policy-implementation expertise. As part of this project, the research team will develop a new, publicly available database of federal agencies that includes information on political environments, agency structure, expertise investment, and agency performance in order to test hypotheses about tradeoffs between political interventions and agency competence. Results from this work will provide insight into how political interactions with government agencies affect the expertise, competence, and, ultimately, performance of those agencies. In the public arena, this is a crucial question: democratic government must be responsive to political direction, yet a government without expertise lacks the capacity to deliver effective services to its citizens. The insights will also matter to non-public organizations, as tradeoffs between interventions by principals and implementations by agents are common to many other types of organization.