Current Research

Working Group Project

“Performance Comparison and Benchmarking in the Public Sector”

Sponsorship: Deutsches Forschungsinstitut für öffentliche Verwaltung (FÖV)

German Research Institution for Public Administration Speyer (GRIP)

 

For the individual sub-projects:

 

   “Benchmarking in Public Administration: A European Cross-Country Comparison”  

The measuring and comparison of performance as well as benchmarking have become a priority in regard to the modernization of the public sector from an international context. Therefore, a European, if not global, trend in Performance Measurement usage can be presumed, and this trend is continually strengthening itself while playing an increasingly more important roll.

To date, there has been no study that deals with the systemization, international and inter-federal comparative analysis and assessment of effects of performance comparison taken from an interdisciplinary perspective.  Against this background the planned project shall address the legal-normative fundamentals, institutional variances, instrumental methods, various modes of application and effects of performance comparison and benchmarking in a national and international context. This will be done through the lens of different administrative-oriented disciplines and their combination. The goal of this network is twofold.  On the one hand, we seek to identify supporting and hindering factors of performance comparison and benchmarking, whereby legal-normative, political-institutional, organizational-structural and economic-fiscal aspects will be taken into consideration. Furthermore, we seek to examine and determine the (methodological) quality of various types, procedures and instruments of performance measurement and comparison. On the other hand, the findings of the project should provide information about applications and terms of use of comparative information in policy and administration.  Moreover, an important evaluative contribution of the working group will be seen in the development of empirical evidence on the results, effects and wider implications of these approaches to reform and in answering the question of whether and how public sector organizations can become productive from the use of performance information, and/or whether or not and how this is pathologically learned.  

 

 In addition to the empirical analysis and legal-normative assessment of performance comparison, the working group project will also include a policy and legal advisory component.  The findings should serve to conceptually, instrumentally and methodologically support future comparative studies in federal and state governments and to provide advisory expertise for these ends. The working group offers the possibility for the development of professional Know-How concerning the functioning, necessary requirements and factors for success of benchmarking in the federal state and for the introduction of this into administrative and legal policy. With these research aims in mind the working group project will concentrate on the following fields of analysis of performance comparison and benchmarking, which shall have a multidisciplinary approach and – if possible – be internationally comparative:

(1)   Development and steering of benchmarking in multilevel systems

(2)   Legal regulation and normative arrangements concerning benchmarking

(3)   Procedures/Indicators of performance measurement; methods (and critiques) of benchmarking

(4)   Fields of application/administrative sectors of benchmarking

(5)   Learning processes, uses, and effects of comparative information and evidence based practices

(6)   Action and design recommendations; further development of benchmarking