Asmus Leth Olsen

The Numerical Psychology of Performance Information: Implications for Citizens, Managers, and Policymakers

ABSTRACT Performance information attaches numbers to the inputs, outputs, and outcomes of public services. Numbers are what separate performance information from other sources of information about public sector performance. In cognitive and social psychology, there are vast amounts of research on the profound effects of numbers on human attitudes and behavior, but these insights are largely unexplored by scholars of performance information. This article introduces the importance of numerical psychology for the study of performance information, pointing out how numerical research both challenges existing beliefs about performance information and allows for the formulation of new hypotheses. These insights are relevant to all levels of study, including citizens, managers, and policymakers.

Responding to problems: actions are rewarded, regardless of the outcome

ABSTRACT When faced with a problem, policymakers have a choice of action or inaction. Psychological research shows varying results on how individuals evaluate (in)actions conditional on the subsequent outcome. I replicate, generalize, and extend this research into a public management setting with two independent experiments embedded in a nationally representative sample of Danish citizens (n = 2,007). Both experiments show that actions are evaluated more positively than inactions – regardless of the outcome. This finding runs contrary to the inaction (or omission) bias but is consistent with evidence on a “norm of action”, in response to poor performance in political–administrative settings.

Keeping the Lights On: Citizen Service Centers in Municipal Amalgamations

How do you make major reforms go down? This was the central question many local politicians faced when implementing amalgamations in the 2007 local government reform in Denmark. An African proverb says that the best way to eat the elephant standing in your path is to cut it up into little pieces. This strategy was also popular in amalgamated municipalities, where the potential loss of closeness was a major challenge to the citizens. This is demonstrated by a study of the diffusion of a new organizational form to organize social service delivery by citizen service centers (CSCs) in a reform context. Empirical evidence from a Poisson regression highlights the importance of the former municipal structure as a determining factor for the prevalence of CSCs in the new municipal structure. Using process tracing, it is argued that the importance of the former structure in the diffusion process reflects that CSCs are employed “to keep to lights on” in the old town halls.

Spending and cutting are two different worlds: experimental evidence from Danish local councils

ABSTRACT This article investigates politicians’ preferences for cutting and spending. The research questions are where do politicians prefer to cut, where do they prefer to spend and how is this influenced by political ideology? These questions are investigated in a large-scale survey experiment fielded to Danish local councillors, who are randomly assigned to a decision-making situation, where the block grant provided to their municipality is either increased or reduced. The results show that the politicians’ preferences for cutting and spending are asymmetric, in the sense that the policy areas, which are assigned the least cuts when the grant is reduced, are rarely the ones which are assigned extra money when the grant is increased. Areas with well-organised interests and a target group which is perceived as deserving are granted more money, whereas policy areas where the target group is perceived as less deserving receive the highest cuts. Ideology matters as left-wing councillors prefer more vague categories when cutting and prioritise childcare and unemployment policies when increasing spending. In contrast, right-wing councillors prefer to cut administration and increase spending on roads.

Order in chaos: Ballot order effects in a post-conflict election?

Ballot order effects are well documented in established democracies, but less so in newly democratizing countries. In this research note we analyze ballot order effects in the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan. The election provides a first look at ballot order effects in a high stakes, post-conflict election. In this setting, we argue that limited cognitive skills and information are more likely explanations of potential ballot order effects than mechanisms of lacking effort or ambivalence of choice. However, we find no clear evidence of a positive effect on the vote share of a higher ballot position. This raises the broader question of how applicable anomalies found in political behavior are to post-conflict democracies.

Behavioral Public Administration: Connecting Psychology with European Public Administration Research

Well-known public administration scholars have stressed the importance of psychological research for the study of public administration. Neighboring disciplines such as economics and political science have witnessed the emergence of the psychology-informed subfields of behavioral economics and political psychology. Along the same lines, an emerging behavioral public administration is an approach characterized by the interdisciplinary analysis of public administration from the micro-perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing upon recent advances in our understanding of the underlying psychology and behavior of individuals and groups. In this chapter we connect past calls for a behavioral public administration with current research in public administration, and outline a path for future integration of public administration and psychology in European public administration.