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In recent years, the level of interest in performance measurement has hit new heights. In this study we seek to examine the extent to which performance measurement has become integrated into contemporary local government management. Our findings show that many local governments in the United States share a strong commitment to the effective use of performance measures, though we do identify some limits to the current state of the practice.
Performance measurement has been part of the lexicon of public administration in the United States for several decades, but rhetoric has outdistanced practice by far in this area. Currently, however, there is a renewed interest in performance measures as an essential element of the results-oriented management movement that is sweeping the field, as reflected in legislative mandates and administrative initiatives as well as considerable conference and training activity and a revived stream of books and articles on the subject. Nevertheless, the extent to which performance measurement has taken hold in a meaningful way in public agencies is still an open question, particularly with respect to local government. Based on a survey of U.S. cities with populations of 25,000 and over, this article explores the extent to which performance measures are used and how they are used in contemporary municipal government.
The Quest For Performance Measurement
Performance measurement is an old idea that has taken on renewed importance. Measuring workload and worker efficiency was clearly part of the scientific management approach at the turn of the century, and the International City Management Association produced a publication on measuring municipal activities as early as 1943 (Ridley and Simon, 1943). In more modern times concern for measuring the performance of public programmatic entities arose with the interest in program budgeting in the 1960s and program evaluation in the 1970s. Harry Hatry and colleagues at the Urban Institute began publishing materials that promoted the use of performance measures and provided instruction on how to develop and use them (Hatry and Fisk, 1971; Waller, et al., 1976; Hatry, et al., 1977), while other authors talked about how to incorporate them in larger management processes (Altman, 1979; Epstein, 1984; Steiss, 1985; Wholey, 1983).
A related but different stream of articles focused on performance measures as they play into the budgeting...