Governance and Public

Management, an Introduction

Carolyn J. Hill
Laurence E. Lynn Jr.

Policy makers, public managers, and program professionals face pressing questions:
Is my policy successful? Is my organization effective? Does my program work? They
are likely to place a high priority on obtaining answers that are unambiguous and
positive. To be relevant to mainstream policy discourse, the policy research community is drawn to answering such questions in specific policy or program contexts,
using a variety of methods, including randomized experiments, quasi-experiments,
and cost-effectiveness analyses.
Of less general political interest are questions concerning how public governance
and management contribute to governmental outcomes: Do the designs of policies
and programs affect their performance? Does management matter and, if so, how?
Are particular organizational structures better than others for accomplishing certain goals and, if so, for whom, when, and where? Answers to these kinds of questions, which are the subject of this symposium, allow practitioners to assess how
they might replicate success (or avoid failure) at other times, in other places, or
under different circumstances; or how poorly performing programs or agencies
might be brought up to the standards of the most successful. Thus, such answers are
of practical importance to public managers because they aim to provide insights
beyond the context of a specific policy or program.
The answers to such questions, however, are more complicated, take longer to
explain, and have more qualifications than answers to the question, Does my program work? (which itself, of course, may be difficult to answer). Producing these
answers is also a challenge to scholarship: Convincing and valid insights require an
understanding of complex relationships in human, social, and organizational
affairs. The use of theory in identifying these relationships is critical, but theories
must be carefully tested rather than assumed or asserted to be true.
The contributors to this symposium are members of an expanding network of
researchers interested in questions of governance and public management using the
theories, models, methods, and data of the social and behavioral sciences.1 To promote rigorous research designs and the prospects for cumulating knowledge about
1

One or more of the authors of each paper also participated in the workshop Models, Methods, and
Data for the Empirical Study of Governance and Public Management, held at the University of Arizona
in May 1999. Contributions to that workshop were collected in Heinrich and Lynn (2000). The papers in
the current symposium explicitly build on intellectual foundations established at that workshop. Thus,
they constitute a second generation of contributionsemploying more refined models, methods, and
datato an expanding project on public governance.

Manuscript received November 2002; review completed January 2003; revisions completed May 2003; accepted July 2003.

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 23, No. 1, 311 (2004)
2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)
DOI: 10.1002/pam.10175

4 / Governance and Public Management

governance, these researchers have found it useful to develop a shared understanding of the substantive dimensions of governance. In this introductory essay, we will
locate their work within the field of public governance and within a particular
logic of governance that has framed their individual efforts.
PUBLIC GOVERNANCE
The intellectual agenda described above is an important part of the field of public
governance. While growing in popularity, the concept of public governance (including the study of public management in a governance context) is less well developed
than the subject of corporate governance, a staple of business school education and
research. Public governance is also harder to study because of the many considerations involved in normative and positive analyses of why and how to govern.
Nonetheless, a growing number of scholars around the world, including the participants in this symposium, are giving definition to this field through their work.
Defining Public Governance
Governancewhether public or privatehas been defined simply as the general
exercise of authority (Michalski, Miller, and Stevens, 2001, p. 9), where authority
refers to systems of accountability and control. It includes global and local arrangements, formal structures and informal norms and practices, and spontaneous and
intentional systems of control (Williamson, 1996).
The subject of corporate governance is, as noted, an active area of research and
debate, and has been defined broadly as the design of institutions that induce or
force management to internalize the welfare of stakeholders (Tirole, 2001, p. 4).2
An analogous characterization might also apply to public sector governance,
namely, institutions to induce public managers to internalize stakeholder interests.
Most scholars, however, recognize a need to include a broader range of concerns in
a concept of public governance. For example, Fredericksons (1997) formulation of
the concept encompasses public administration, stakeholder pluralism, management within networks, and legitimacy.3 Recently, we have defined public sector governance as regimes of laws, rules, judicial decisions, and administrative practices
that constrain, prescribe, and enable the provision of publicly supported goods and
services through associations with agents in the public and private sectors (Lynn,
Heinrich, and Hill, 2001, p. 7). This definition of governance includes public management: the behaviors and contributions to governmental performance of actors
performing managerial roles.4
Studying Public Governance
Research on public sector governance is emerging from bodies of literature that
encompass comparative, national, and subnational research on public management
2 Corporate governance has also been defined more narrowly as ways in which suppliers of finance to
corporations assure themselves of getting a return on their investment (Shleifer and Vishny, 1997,
p. 737).
3 As another example, Canadas Institute on Governance (2002) has defined governance as the traditions, institutions, and processes that determine how power is exercised, how citizens are given a voice,
and how decisions are made on issues of public concern.
4 Lynn (2003) traces the understanding of public management since the early writings on American public administration.

Governance and Public Management / 5

reform (Pollitt, 2000), as well as on international governance and management (for

example, Gerri, 2001). Comparative work has been one of the most active areas of
public governance research (Kettl, 2000; OECD, 1995, 2001; Peters and Savoie,
1995, 1998; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000). National and comparative studies of public governance, however, have thus far largely been preoccupied with describing
the new measures, comparing measures from various countries and assessing the
impact on accountability and have devoted relatively little effort to empirically verifying claimed results or to identifying causal relationships (Peters and Savoie,
1998, p. 7).
Empirical research on comparative governance exemplifies one of three research
strategies generally used in the empirical study of public governance and management. This first strategy tends to adopt a historical, descriptive, and institutional
orientation. Insights and conclusions are based on systematic reviews and assessments of official documents, including surveys of reform activity, interviews and
other forms of field observation, and secondary research by academics, consultants,
and practitioners. The analysis of such materials often takes the form of classification schemes in which reforms or their characteristic features are associated with
contextual and other factors (see, for example, Hood, 2002; Peters, 1996; Pollitt and
Bouckaert, 2000; and the references in Lynn, 1997).
A second research strategy attempts to identify best practices through the collection of detailed case studies of actual management problems. The accumulation
and perusal of detailed cases aims to reveal what works and what doesnt, congealing conclusions into principles and recipes for effective practice that resonate with
the real world as practitioners understand it. Examples of this type of strategy
include books by Light (1998) on innovations in nonprofits and governments, by
Bardach (1998) on organizational cooperation, and by Haass (1999) on public sector management and leadership.
A third strategy for studying public governance and management uses the formal
theories, models, methods, and data of the social and behavioral sciences to study
governmental processes and to develop a body of empirical knowledge concerning
what works and why. This strategy, which depends on reductive abstraction, sacrifices verisimilitude and nuance but gains in transparency and replicability.5 Using
formal theories to develop hypotheses that are falsifiable is an important component of this endeavor: doing so helps clarify suppositions and findings about governance and managerial processes.
The contributors to this symposium are among a growing number of scholars
who are producing (self-consciously and in collaboration with others) such theorybased empirical work on questions of governance and public management. These
particular scholars are hardly unique, however: The body of empirical scholarship
that draws on formal theory to examine governance issues is large and growing
(see, for example, Boyne, Powell, and Ashworth, 2001; Hill and Lynn, 2003). Studies of this kind are regularly published in scores of academic journals across numerous disciplines, fields, and subspecialties. Because individual research communities
rarely communicate with one another, though, it is difficult to know whether the
results of these dispersed efforts are cumulating to more general insights of practical value. For this reason, symposium authors refer to an overarching analytic
framework that can assist in creating broader pictures than we can gain from any
particular study or vein of literature.
5 The best studies, however, integrate quantitative analysis with knowledge and insights gained from
qualitative research and practitioner insights.

6 / Governance and Public Management

A LOGIC OF GOVERNANCE
The rule of lawincluding lawmaking, its adjudication, and its institutional expressionis a useful starting point for analyzing governance and interpreting relevant
empirical research. The Constitution and the institutions that have arisen under its
sanction legitimize governance and public management in the United States. The
definition of governance that we suggested earlierregimes of laws, rules, judicial
decisions, and administrative practices that constrain, prescribe, and enable the
provision of publicly supported goods and serviceslinks constitutional institutions with the realities of policymaking and public management.6 Underlying this
concept is recognition that governance involves means for achieving direction, control, and coordination of individuals or organizational units on behalf of their common interests (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill, 2001; Vickers, 1983; Wamsley, 1990). From
this fundamental starting point, it is possible to construct an analytic framework
that provides conceptual order to the systematic empirical study of governance.
Any governance regime is the outcome of a dynamic process that can be summarized in terms of a core logic.7 This process links several aspects of collective
action and may be expressed in the following set of hierarchical interactions (see
Figure 1):

between (a) citizen preferences and interests expressed politically and (b)
public choice expressed in enacted legislation or executive policies;
between (b) public choice and (c) formal structures and processes of public
agencies;
between (c) the structures of formal authority and (d) discretionary organization, management, and administration;
between (d) discretionary organization, management, and administration
and (e) core technologies, primary work, and service transactions overseen by
public agencies;
between (e) primary work and (f) consequences, outcomes, outputs, or results;
between (f) consequences, outcomes, outputs, or results and (g) stakeholder
assessments of agency or program performance; and
between (g) stakeholder assessments and (a) public interests and preferences.

Employing the entirety of this logic in more than a descriptive way in a single
empirical study is intellectually and practically daunting if not impossible. The
plethora of research communities tend either to focus on narrow bands of causal
relationships (for example, public choice on public opinion, interests, and legislative behavior; organizational studies on structures and processes; management
studies on managerial behavior and its consequences; human services fields on
treatments and outcomes) or on two or three (not necessarily adjacent) levels
within a particular policy domain (e.g., public health research on how laws affect
individual behavior or nonprofit research on how ownership affects efficiency and
service distribution).
Interdependencies across levels undoubtedly exist in all fields, however. This possibility ought to be recognized in framing and interpreting research even though it
cannot be fully incorporated in formal models and data analyses. To facilitate com-

6
7

A similar formulation can be created for nations with different constitutional and legal institutions.
For a fuller development of the ideas in this section, see Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill (2000a, b, 2001).

Governance and Public Management / 7

Figure 1. A political economy logic of governance.

prehension of the possibilities in empirical governance research, a reduced-form
expression can serve as a framing device:
O
f (E, C, T, S, M)

(Eq. 1)

where:
O = outputs/outcomes (individual or organizational);
E = environmental factors (political, economic, and so on);
C = client or consumer characteristics;
T = treatments (primary work, core processes, or technology);
S = structures (administrative or organizational); and
M = managerial roles, strategies, or actions.
Governmental outputs or outcomes, in other words, may depend in the general
case on several classes of exogenous variables.8 The intellectual challenge for an
individual researcher is to create a causal model postulating how different kinds
and levels of variables are directly and indirectly related in the particular aspects of
governance under investigation. The resulting model will become the basis for
8

This is true regardless of the conceptual lens or theoretical orientation (e.g., political economy, network
analysis, systems theory, historical/institutional description) with which the research question is
approached.

8 / Governance and Public Management

empirical analysis that tests hypothesized relationships while controlling for other
influential factors.
The reduced form expression and the hierarchical logic of governance that underlies it are useful in suggesting the kinds of variables and interrelationships that
might be incorporated in research designs for analyzing particular data sets. Our
reading of the literature suggests that such interrelationships are not being
accounted for (in the empirical models or in the discussions) in most studies that
purport to say something about public sector governance and management (Hill
and Lynn, 2003; Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill, 2001). The consequences may be that disparate research about public governance and management are underconceptualized, insufficiently attentive to context, and, because external validity is weak, of little use for practice.
References to a logic of governance and to its reduced form expression are useful
in empirical research for at least two additional reasons. First, the logic enables
investigatorsand readers of their analysesto locate individual research projects
in a framework that identifies factors with potential influence on the results. It
encourages discussion of limitations on findings that are attributable to the models, methods, and data used, as well as discussion of competing explanations that
may be consistent with empirical observations. Thus, this framework serves as a
reminder of the endogeneity of complex governance processes.
Second, this logic of governance assists in integrating the findings of dispersed
but conceptually related literatures: Does governance matter to governmental performance? Are there substantive, useful findings concerning what matters? What
are the implications of these findings for theory building and research agendas?9
WHAT DO WE KNOW, AND HOW?
As already noted, research that can provide information on public governance and
public management takes place across a range of disciplines, subdisciplines, subfields, and substantive issue areas (by no means restricted to public administration
or public management journals or books). As Meier, OToole, and Nicholson-Crotty
note in their symposium paper, the likelihood that results of these individual studies will cohere into broader, more generalizable insights will increase if scholars are
able to locate their work within an analytic framework that shows how particular
issues of policy design, organization, management, and delivery of services are
related to a multilevel perspective on governance.
In separate work, we reviewed governance research published in more than 70
academic journals from 1990 to 2001 in an effort to assess whether and how findings cohere across disperse sources (Hill and Lynn, 2003). From these sources, we
identified more than 800 studies that specify relationships between at least two levels in the logic of governance. This effort provides a synoptic view of what we know
about public sector governance (and how we know it), and yields some intriguing
insights. Our review indicates that although the empirical literature on governance
reports extensive positive findings, most of these findings are contingent: Few if any
generic management principles are directly confirmed. Furthermore, our review
indicates that governance can matter: Variables at virtually every level of the gover9
For example, Bradley (2003) examines about 50 studies that investigate the relationships between ownership (for-profit, nonprofit, government) and inputs, outputs, and outcomes. She uses the reduced form
as a guide to compare models across these studies in order to determine if study results are comparable
and cumulative.

Governance and Public Management / 9

nance hierarchy both influence and are influenced by variables at other levels, and
these relationships are statistically and substantively significant.10 For example:

Structural factors (such as legislated policy design elements, organizational

hierarchies, and administrative procedures) provide significant explanations
for the values of a broad range of dependent variables.
Public management (including factors such as administrative arrangements,
use of managerial tools, and management values or strategies) have demonstrable effects on subordinate levels of public administration and on governmental performance. Managerial values and strategies themselves appear to
be shaped by the institutional environment, but specific managerial practices
tend to be influenced by proximate resource and organizational constraints.
Governance at the treatment level (including factors such as program design
features, worker discretionary activity, worker beliefs and values, and administrative processes established in the field) also have significant effects on governmental performance.

An important objective of governance research is to identify the determinants of

governmental performance in order to inform administrative reform, public policy
design, and public management practice. In pursuing this endeavor, the central theoretical problem is applying theories that impose a causal logic linking context, governance, and consequences or outcomes.
A single study of a governance regime or outcome cannot measure or incorporate
all the factors that may influence the relationships of interest. Thus, it is useful to
assess whether findings across studies provide consistent evidence concerning the
general questions of governance. A logic such as the one presented above provides
a common language to assess dispersed studies. For example, we identified few
studies (Hill and Lynn, 2003) that use the same kind of causal logic that Donahue
uses in her symposium article: that is, the relationship between managerial values
and strategies and agency use of resources or performance (e.g., efficiency, costs,
and quality). These studiesin areas of education, health, and local public servicesfound that specific managerial strategies or decisions may affect costs, perceived effectiveness, and efficiency, but these relationships are not always significant. Moreover, the relationships are contingent on the control variables in the
models and so are not directly comparable.
Furthermore, regardless of the data available in a particular analysis, the
researchers reference to a logic of governance can encourage explicit consideration
of the wider context in which the study takes place, can prompt discussion of possible competing explanations, and can improve the chances that consumers of the
research will understand the implications for management and governance for
other programs and policies in other contexts.
WHAT DOES THIS SYMPOSIUM CONTRIBUTE?
In this symposium, each paper addresses different strata in the governance framework, yet each explicitly links its findings to the larger issue of governance. Moreover, each of these papers incites curiosity as to how its findings relate to the larger
literature on the specific governance concepts it considers. Specifically, Knott and
10

These estimated relationships may or may not be robust to different model specifications or research
designs.

10 / Governance and Public Management

Payne show that administrative structures affect resources and productivity in

higher education. Meier, OToole, and Nicholson-Crotty show that certain politically
important management variables, in particular the representativeness of school district staffs, affect student outcomes in Texas public school districts. Heinrich and
Fournier show that organizational forms and structures affect treatment outcomes
in drug abuse service delivery units, albeit in complex ways. Donahue shows that
specific managerial practices affect the cost of fire protection in New York State fire
departments.
The papers illustrate how theory-based, empirical research on public governance
and management that consistently references a broader framework can contribute
to the accumulation of knowledge about public governance, management, and performance. We are encouraged to imagine that the community of governance
researchers might move toward an understanding of the subject that is greater than
the sum of its contributing parts. We believe that the symposium as a whole supports such an argument.
CAROLYN J. HILL is an Assistant Professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute,
Georgetown University.
LAURENCE E. LYNN JR. is the George Bush Chair and a Professor of Public Affairs
in the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
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