Contracts, Agency Vulnerability, and the Allocation of Federal Funds

Legislators have the potential for credit claiming from agency spending in a congressional district only when the awarded contracts or grants are sufficiently large to be noticed or appreciated. Therefore, unlike previous research on distributive politics, we examine the allocation of contracts considering the size of the contracts, not just the overall spending or the numbers of contracts per congressional district. We use a difference-in-difference analysis to evaluate how agencies altered their allocations of contracts in response to the 2006 congressional elections, in which partisan control of the Congress changed to the Democrats. We find that federal agencies responded to the election by allocating larger contracts to Democratic districts. In addition, we find that agencies whose programs received lower scores on the Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) allocated larger contracts to Democratic than Republican districts than did agencies whose programs received higher PART ratings.

Why Government Program Evaluation Methodologies Require Improvement

Government programs in the Russian Federation are often the subject of strong criticism, especially due to the obvious significant shortcomings in the methodologies used for their evaluation. The reasons for those shortcomings are numerous. Executives in charge of both federal and regional level government programs are sometimes provided with excessive authority for the selection of evaluation methods, and the assessment of target vs. planned indicator values can be statistically unreliable. The criteria for program management assessment are rather perfunctory compared with international practice, which involves meaningful management result evaluation. The algorithms used to calculate efficiency indicators often lead to logical contradictions. Recommendations are given on streamlining assessment methodologies of state program execution, the key ones being: (a) feasibility substantiation and application of the modified Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) method for assessing the degree of meeting the program’s goals, based on three individual ranking scores which take into account the advisability of pursuing the program, the quality of the program’s management and the program’s final results; (b) method of assessing the program output based on an algorithm which takes account of any inequivalence of subprograms’ target indicators, subprograms themselves and the main target indicators of the state program; (c) method of program performance assessment for a specific calendar year, based on the adjustment of integral evaluation of the program’s output with regard to the correlation between the real and projected amounts of its financing and the dynamics of changes in efficiency assessment rankings for the whole assessment period.

Do Public Employees “Game” Performance Budgeting Systems? Evidence From the Program Assessment Rating Tool in Korea

We examine whether performance budgeting systems such as the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) induce public employees to engage in “gaming” behavior. We propose an algorithm for detecting gaming behavior that makes use of the discrete nature of the PART system in Korea (KPART) and the revealed patterns of the distribution of the KPART scores. By employing the test developed by McCrary, we find suspicious patterns in the density of the KPART scores and evidence points to the fact that manipulation is prevalent in the KPART system. Our analysis suggests that public employees are sensitive to negative incentives and that great care must be taken when designing performance budgeting systems.