E. Sam Overman

Information, market government, and health policy: a study of health data organizations in the states.

Information is essential to the success of market-oriented policies. Information on health care costs and quality is collected and distributed by state governments through health data organizations (HDOs) to enhance competition and lower costs in the medical industry and to improve consumer choice among medical alternatives. This article examines the information collected, produced, and distributed by state health data organizations in Colorado and Pennsylvania. Findings reveal that information was not the objective determinant of choice and competition as market-oriented policy designers had hoped. Nor did market-oriented bureaucracies produce and distribute data readily accessible for public choice. Instead, information produced and distributed by these HDOs was the result of political and bureaucratic exercises that conform much more to classic interest group policymaking and captured bureaucracies than to contemporary market-oriented government ideals. The findings underscore the extraordinary difficulties facing federal-level policy designers as they contemplate introducing market-oriented health care policies on the national level.

Doctoral education in public affairs and administration: issues for the 1990s

This paper reports the results of a 1990 survey of 60 NASPAA doctoral programs in public affairs and administration. It presents descriptive data about a variety of facets of public affairs and administration doctoral programs: program and institutional structure, size, student diversity, number of degrees granted, and faculty hires. Respondents identified five broad areas as sources for special concern for the design and operation of doctoral programs: (1) problems that stem from limited resource availability; (2) issues related to the quality of the educational program; (3) questions dealing with the definition of the scope of offerings and requirements; (4) considerations for the needs of part-time students; and (5) issues of minority recruitment and retention. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues that the survey findings pose for doctoral education in public affairs and administration.

The transfer of information systems technology in state governments

Abstract State governments are increasingly utilizing various information technologies to fulfill multiple and increasingly complex obligations. One important source of information systems technology for states consists of agencies in other states, which perform similar functions and have therefore “pretested” potentially useful computer-based applications. This study is based upon longitudinal data collected by the National Association of State information Systems (NASIS) which examines the transfer of software programs to and from each of the 50 states. An issue which occupies an important part of the literature on the transfer and diffusion of technology concerns how and why public sector organizations adopt new technology, and the relative importance of internal organizational factors and external contextual factors in the adoption process. Using relevant state-level sociodemographic data, this study examines the relationship of contextual factors thought to influence transfers to five measures of transfer activity calculated from the NASIS data. The findings reaffirm the importance of both external and internal factors to information technology diffusion among the states.

Computerized information systems and public sector productivity

This article examines three competing theoretical perspectives to explain utilization of information technology in the public sector. The multivariate analysis is based upon a survey of 566 state-level managers. Propositions tested include both single and combined influences of representative variables from each of three different research paradigms. The conclusion discusses the implications of the findings toward making improvements in public sector productivity among public managers and for public organizations in general.