JPART 17:61–76
Does Democracy Matter? A Transatlantic
Research Design on Democratic
Performance and Special Purpose
Governments
Chris Skelcher
ABSTRACT
The next big step in public management research is to move beyond the question of whether
management matters to answer the question: does democracy matter? The public management discipline has largely ignored the impact of democratic structure on performance, partly
because of limited variation in the constitutional design of public service organizations.
Recent growth in the number and types of special purpose governments offers an organizational population with a wider distribution on the democratic structure parameter.
Conceptual and methodological advances in delimiting and measuring ‘‘democratic
performance’’ as a function of formal structures and informal practices provide an intellectual
infrastructure for scholars. Hypotheses are derived in which democratic performance is either
a dependent or independent variable. Differences in contextual variables in the United
Kingdom and the United States make transatlantic comparative research a worthwhile proposition. A research strategy for generating knowledge on ‘‘does democracy matter?’’ is set out.
How does the structure and intensity of democratic engagement and supervision affect
public service performance? This article proposes a research design, potential data set, and
initial hypotheses that can be used to generate answers to this question through comparative
study of U.K. and U.S. special purpose governments.1 It addresses a central finding of Hill
and Lynn’s (2005) recent meta-analysis of over eight hundred empirical studies that public
management scholars know relatively little about how the democratic structure of public
An earlier version of this article was presented to the eighth Public Management Research Association conference,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in September 2005. My thanks to the participants and JPART referees
for their very helpful comments. The U.K. Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) supported the research
presented in this article. The research originated under ESRC/EPSRC Advanced Institute of Management Research
Fellowship RES-331-30-000129, ‘‘Governance and performance,’’ and continues under Research Award RES-000-231295, ‘‘Democratic anchorage of governance networks in European countries.’’ Address correspondence to the author at
[email protected].
1
I have used the U.S. term ‘‘special purpose government,’’ even though it is not widely used in Europe, since it
conveys the role of such bodies in shaping, making, and delivering public policy within a narrowly defined competence,
in contrast to a ‘‘general purpose government,’’ such an elected city council (Foster 1997).
doi:10.1093/jopart/muj014
Advance Access publication on April 26, 2006
ª The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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University of Birmingham
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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
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organizations impacts on their performance. Hill and Lynn (2005) comment on the limited
attention given to ‘‘structures of formal authority’’ and ‘‘citizen preferences and interests’’ as
either dependent or independent variables. In a similar vein, Feldman and Khademian
(2002) point to weaknesses in understanding the relationship between governance, management, and organizational performance. They argue the need to move beyond the prevailing
assumptions of principal-agent theory and propose that research conceptualize governance
structures as the outcomes of dynamic and interactive processes, in which public managers
play an active role and are not purely the recipients of top-down hierarchical accountability.
From this perspective, managers help to enact democracy as well as deliver public services.
The lack of a systematic evidence base on the ways in which democratic structure
matters to public service performance is more than just an academic issue. Governments,
not-for-profits, and community actors are increasingly interested in new ways of making
and delivering public policy. Debates about deliberative democracy, neighborhood governance, co-production, and active citizenship presuppose change to both public bureaucracy
and service contracting and the creation of new governance forms that can accommodate interactive decision making and multiple accountabilities. This movement has
global reach, stimulating a wide range of experiments with different forms of governance
and potentially competing modes of democracy (Klijn and Skelcher, forthcoming).
Although the knowledge base on the impact of governance structures is limited, that
on how and under what conditions management matters is considerable (e.g., Boyne et al.
2003; Heinrich and Lynn 2000; Ingraham, Joyce, and Donahue 2003; O’Toole and Meier
2004). This knowledge gap is not just a matter of the preferences of researchers. There are
significant conceptual and methodological issues to overcome. Understanding whether and
how democracy matters requires the ability to conceptualize governance structures in ways
that make comparative analysis possible. It is necessary, also, to measure the democratic
parameter in a way that will enable associations to be drawn with data on organizational
performance in delivering services or implementing programs. New methodologies that
meet these requirements are now emerging, and there is the potential to apply these to
a large population of organizations that so far have not been subject to systematic research.
This population consists of special purpose governments in the United States and United
Kingdom. They exhibit considerable variety of governance structure and democratic articulation to elected officials and publics, and thus they offer a potentially valuable data set.
This holds out the prospect that the discipline will be able to move beyond the question of
whether management matters to consider the higher order issue of whether and in what
ways democracy matters to performance. This is the big unresolved question in our field,
and one that mandates serious attention.
The first part of the article discusses why scholars should now turn their attention to
the question of whether and to what extent democracy matters for performance. The article
then shows the value of special purpose governments as an embryonic data set. It also
explores the key structural distinction between bodies that are and are not subject to an
electoral process. In the next section, ways of tackling the conceptual and methodological
problems of defining and measuring democratic performance are discussed. The fourth
section of the article sets out a number of hypotheses in which democratic performance is
either the dependent or independent variable. The article concludes by outlining a research
program on the democratic performance of special purpose governments that can contribute to the wider ‘‘governance and performance’’ framework (Heinrich and Lynn 2000;
Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2001).
Skelcher
Does Democracy Matter?
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THE CASE FOR EXAMINING DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURE
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The need to consider the impact of the democratic structure of public bodies reflects a growing awareness that new forms of governance introduce distinct problems for the theory and
practice of public accountability. The growth of third-party government and arm’s-length
public corporations requires a reconsideration of how public purpose can be defined and
secured (O’Toole 1997; Salamon 2002; Skelcher 1998). Koppell (2003, 164), for example,
concludes his study of hybrids—public corporations created by the U.S. federal government—
by noting that the creation of ‘‘hybrid organizations (and other novel institutional arrangements) in the public sector needs to be accompanied by a reconsideration of our notions of
accountability.’’ He shows how a hybrid design promises performance but at the cost of
control and accountability to the political principal. Milward and Provan (2000) explore the
impact of third-party contracting on the legitimacy of government and highlight the need for
greater understanding of governance in the hollow state. Recent work on new public organizational designs in the United Kingdom demonstrates that the predominant discourse of
‘‘partnership’’ suggests inclusion of multiple stakeholders but conceals considerable variation in the structure and practice of accountability (Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith 2005).
Davies (2002), MacKinnon (2000), and others take a critical perspective on this issue,
arguing that new technologies enable the increased capacity of government to steer at
a distance through intermediary structures, thus undermining local democratic processes.
Institution building in the context of interagency cooperation, often associated with
innovative institutional designs and greater opportunities for user and citizen involvement,
adds another dimension (Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). Lines
of accountability are less clear, public organizations relate to several political principals
rather than one elected official, and there can be a mix of representative, delegate, and
direct democracy around the core policymaking process. Smith and Ingraham (2002) show
how, in the United States, a political culture based on representative democracy faces
problems of adjustment due to the different norms that third-party government brings to
such matters as citizen involvement and transparency. Bogason, Kensen, and Miller (2002)
make a similar point, noting the growth of ‘‘extra-formal democracy’’ outside electoral
processes and identifying the problems of legitimacy and authorization that this introduces
for public policymaking. Sørensen (2002) and Andersen (2004), writing from a Scandinavian perspective, recognize these issues but draw more optimistic conclusions. They see
the development of network governance and public-private partnerships as having the
potential to revitalize liberal democracy and provide new channels for citizen participation.
In the context of neighborhood and community-based organizations in U.S. cities, Chaskin
(2003) notes the fundamental questions of legitimacy and accountability that emerge as
a result of their role in local governance and the way in which solutions are negotiated with
institutions of representative democracy. Klijn and Koppenjan (2000), from their Netherlands research, show how such interactive decision making presents problems for elected
politicians in the context of their traditional role.
This brief review of recent research highlights the current significance of the democratic parameter, as well as the increased attention it is gaining because of the growth of
nontraditional organizational forms in the public sector and changes in the theories and
ideas through which scholars are understanding the field. The discussion now moves to
a consideration of the population of organizations that might form the empirical basis for
such investigation.
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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
THE POTENTIAL DATA SET: SPECIAL PURPOSE GOVERNMENTS
The Characteristics of Special Purpose Governments
2
This is not to underestimate the importance of taxonomy for academic and policy reasons. Weir (1996) has argued,
in relation to U.K. quangos, that the failure to clarify exactly what is included in this sizable and significant part of the
governmental sector disempowers both effective critical analysis and the debate about reform. However, the task is not
without its difficulties (Skelcher 1998; Thynne 2003; Wettenhall 2003), and pragmatic judgments rather than exact
definitions may be the best that can be achieved, at least in the context of the United Kingdom’s approach to
constitutionalism.
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The value of studying special purpose governments as an organizational population is that
they contain a range of democratic structures. These vary from directly elected governing
councils, through hybrid boards consisting of managerial, nominated, and elected members, to executives constituted by appointment of a political principal or independent commission. The distribution of special purpose governments along the democratic structure
parameter is less clustered than for local, state and regional, and national government,
where elected bodies predominate.
Without getting too involved in the problems of taxonomy,2 it is sufficient for the
purposes of this article to say that this class of organizations undertakes specific and limited
public functions, in the exercise of which they have a degree of independent authority with
respect to the general purpose democratic institutions of national, (state), and local government. This authority may be enhanced by their legal powers, corporate status, independent
revenue-raising rights, or popularly elected board. Examples include the various forms of
special districts, public authorities, and school districts in the United States, school governing boards and multi-agency ‘‘partnership’’ bodies in the United Kingdom, and neighborhood regeneration organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. They also include the
multiplicity of arm’s-length bodies found in the U.K. and U.S. public administration systems, variously termed ‘‘quangos’’ and ‘‘hybrids.’’
Special purpose governments have been subject to relatively little academic analysis,
in comparison to the institutions of elected national and subnational government. Academics are subject to the strong gravitational attraction exerted by matters of high politics—for
example, the relationship between the executive and legislature at the national or city level.
In contrast, special purpose governments up until now have not been the focus of significant research efforts, other than by occasional scholars (e.g., Foster 1997). These entities
are frequently positioned some way down the chain of the public policy process and thus
appear to be marginal to matters of ‘‘high politics.’’
Yet special purpose governments are now being recognized as a worthwhile and important object of academic analysis. Among the recent book-length treatments are those on
quangos in the United Kingdom (Skelcher 1998), the Netherlands (Van Thiel 2001), and
internationally (Talbot and Pollitt 2003); hybrids in the United States (Koppell 2003); U.S.
special purpose governments (Foster 1997); and collaborative public management in the
United States (Agranoff and McGuire 2003) and the United Kingdom (Sullivan and
Skelcher 2002). There is also a growing body of research on various aspects of special purpose governments being reported in the leading journals. One factor driving this investigation into previously occluded parts of the governmental and public management system is
the development of theory. As we understand more about the complexities of the policy
Skelcher
Does Democracy Matter?
Special Purpose Governments with Elections
In absolute numerical terms at least, the indicative evidence is that the majority of U.S. and
U.K. special purpose governments have an electoral process.3 In the United States the
boards of special districts and those school districts not subject to mayoral control are
elected. In the United Kingdom all schools have a governing body in which one-third of
places are reserved for elected parents. The boards of the relatively small number of New
Deal for Community Partnerships are elected, as are the boards of governors of Foundation
Hospitals in England. However, an analysis by type of body rather than absolute number
would be more appropriate, in order to overcome the bias introduced by the disproportionately large number of special districts and school districts and governing bodies. On
this basis, data on the United Kingdom lead to the conclusion that election is the exception
to the general rule of appointment or nomination to the board (Sullivan and Skelcher 2002).
The position in the United States remains to be established.
The U.S. literature is largely silent on the impact of electoral politics on special and
school districts. For example, Foster’s (1997) analysis of special districts is comprehensive
other than in respect of the democratic dimension. The limited evidence (which is mainly
on school districts) points to features such as variation in turnout depending on the salience
of local issues (e.g., Meier 2002); differential impact of forms of election on minority
representation on the board (e.g., Feuerstein 2002); and the failure of electoral processes to
prevent insularity, stagnation, and an imbalance of power in favor of the superintendent
(e.g., Mintrom 2001).
The research evidence on those few types of U.K. special purpose governments having
elections to the board is also limited. There is a developing literature on the role of those
parents who are elected to school governing bodies, although thus far it has concentrated
on the motivation and sustainability of such volunteering (e.g., Ranson et al. 2003).
3
The evidence is indicative for several reasons. To my knowledge, the U.S. Census of Governments has not
been analyzed to extract the data on whether boards are elected. The U.S. Census of Governments does not appear
to include comprehensive data on subordinate agencies (e.g., nonprofit public benefit corporations) or partnerships
between local government and community, nonprofit and business. There is no equivalent to the US Census of
Governments for the United Kingdom. The closest databases are Public Bodies, which only covers national quangos,
and the analysis of partnership types in Sullivan and Skelcher (2002).
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formulation and implementation process, and generate insights informed by theories of
network rather than hierarchical governance, so these semi-autonomous governmental
bodies become revealed as institutions that theoretically, if not empirically, make a difference to public policy choices and outcomes.
Special purpose governments fulfill a public purpose, and by virtue of this they are
designed to have some form of democratic structure to anchor them to the community. The
discussion above illustrates that the way in which their democratic aspect is expressed
varies across the classes of bodies with which we are concerned. The most fundamental
form of democratic expression is through direct election to the organization’s governing
council or board. Appointment by a political principal or nominations by the membership
provide alternative and less direct forms of democratic articulation. The following sections
consider the evidence on how special purpose governments are structured in respect of
each of these approaches to democracy.
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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Special Purpose Governments Appointed or Nominated
Special purpose governments without electoral processes operate at arm’s length to centers
of elected political authority. In place of election, a single political principal may appoint
members to the board (for example, the minister or mayor), or the board membership may
be composed of nominees of participating member organizations (as, for example, a neighborhood improvement partnership involving community, governmental, and business
organizations). This potentially gives a more focused principal-agent relationship than is
possible under citizen election. However, it also accentuates the problems of legitimacy
and accountability in respect of the wider public purpose of the body.
There have been some studies of the democratic performance of unelected special
purpose governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Koppell (2003) provides a recent U.S.
example. He employs a principal-agent model to evaluate the bureaucratic control of three
U.S. government corporations. He finds that the political principal, having created an arm’slength organization, then finds that it takes on a life of its own. In the case of what Koppell
terms ‘‘hybrids’’—private organizations delivering public goals—the nature of the incentives to which the agent responds reduces the efficiency of regulatory control systems.
Koppell goes on to show that the design characteristics of these institutions enable them to
take full advantage of their joint public-private status, while being relatively immune from
the constraints that normally apply in each sector. Their structural features also enable them
to exert considerable political leverage, introducing the possibility that the principal-agent
relationship is reversed. Koppell concludes that hybrids present significant problems of
accountability, and that these are likely to increase as such novel organizational forms
become used more frequently.
Research in the United Kingdom draws broadly similar conclusions about the accountability issues. Weir and Hall’s (1994) studies of national-level quangos specifically
assess these organizations’ design characteristics and conclude that they are more limited
than those applying to elected bodies. The authors also highlight inadequacies in the
methods of board appointment, although policy has recently changed to increase impartiality and transparency in the process. Parallel studies of local-level quangos found considerable variation in accountability arrangements, some of which were weaker than those
at national level (Skelcher 1998). More recent analyses of partnership bodies find a similar
position and note the problem of the extraconstitutional status that predominates in the
design solution (Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith 2005).
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The evidence from elections to the geographically specific New Deal for Community
partnerships is that turnout is no better or worse than it would be for local government
elections (Rallings and Thrasher 2002), and the analysis has not yet been undertaken on the
2004 inaugural elections for Foundation Hospitals. There is no real evidence on the impact
of electoral processes and politics on board composition, policy choices, legitimacy and
accountability, and performance outcomes.
In conclusion, Meier’s (2002) commentary on the U.S. school district literature produces some forty-one hypotheses. This suggests that the study of the electoral aspects of
democratic performance of special purpose governments is a fruitful area for further research, not least comparatively with those bodies where appointment or nomination is the
method of constructing the board.
Skelcher
Does Democracy Matter?
67
The Comparative Perspective: Special Purpose Governments in the
United Kingdom and United States
DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE: A METHODOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
It is conventional to analyze the democratic governance of special purpose governments as
a problem of accountability within a principal-agent framework. This is predicated on the
4
The distinction being drawn between the U.S. and U.K. special purpose worlds is a matter of degree rather
than absolute differences. Organizations reflecting the U.K. design template will be found in the United States, but
they tend to be the exception in the face of strong constitutionalism.
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There is a well-established academic tradition of Anglo-American comparative studies of
public management and political systems, selected using the ‘‘most similar cases’’ rationale
(Peters 1998). The research design proposed here maintains this logic in relation to the
overall characteristics of the societies, and specifically in terms of the contemporary
emphasis on single purpose governments found in both countries. However, there are also
differences between the special purpose worlds of the United Kingdom and the United
States and in the relative importance both nations give to constitutionalism and democratic
accountability in their governmental systems.
The main distinctions—democratic structure, constitutionalism, and managerial
action—are highlighted here and are used to generate a number of hypotheses later in the
article. First, U.K. special purpose bodies are overwhelmingly created by administrative
action of the political executive at the central or local government level, or even by
managerial decision, rather than through the legislative process that tends to be the convention in the United States. Second, many U.K. bodies do not have a legal identity. Multiagency partnerships at the local level are frequently constituted as ‘‘unincorporated associations’’ that are only able to acquire and expend financial resources and enter into
contracts by virtue of one of their members being a statutory public body (such as a local
government) that is willing to act on behalf of the partnership (Sullivan and Skelcher
2002). Third, the resourcing of U.K. special purpose bodies is primarily through government grants or subventions. Such bodies typically do not have the legal power of many of
their U.S. counterparts to tax citizens, charge users, or issue bonds. Fourth, the boards of
U.K. bodies are seldom subject to election by citizens. In general, board members are
nominated by the public, business, or not-for-profit organizations associated with the
particular policy sector. Consequently managers, rather than elected officials or citizens,
predominate on boards. Only in the case of some neighborhood regeneration boards are
members elected from the local community, but even here they tend to be in the minority.
In the United States election is the primary means of board composition. Fifth, the democratic safeguards on the activities of U.K. special purpose bodies are in the main less
onerous than those applied to elected local governments. Transparency and accountability
of the boards are low, and boards largely operate outside the conventions that apply to
mainstream elected governmental organizations (Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith 2005).
Sixth, U.K. public managers have considerable discretion in shaping the day-to-day extraconstitutional practices of these special purpose governments, including the way they
relate to citizens and organized constituencies. In the United States, in contrast, there tends
to be a greater emphasis on governance in line with principles of constitutional regularity
and democratic accountability through election of officeholders.4
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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
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notion that special purpose governments have been established to implement predefined
public policies, and that governance structures enable a relationship of accountability
between political principals and the public organizations as their agents. Accountability,
however, is a somewhat inexact concept, especially outside the strictures of a bilateral
principal-agent relationship (Behn 2001; Papadopoulos 2003). This makes it difficult to
operationalize and produce quantitative measures. In addition, the insights of network
governance and organization theory demonstrate that the principal-agent model is frequently not able to capture the complexities of multiple principals, or indeed of multiple
agents, in the case of bodies that are collaboratives (Child and Rodrigues 2003; Koppenjan
and Klijn 2004).
A different approach can be developed from Feldman and Khademian’s (2002) view
that multiple and reciprocal relationships structure and enable public accountability. This
reflects the wider literature on network governance, which stresses interdependencies and
collaboration in contrast to hierarchical and compliance relationships (Agranoff and
McGuire 2003; Goldsmith and Eggers 2004; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004). Consequently,
the analysis of the governance of special purpose bodies is predicated on a conceptualization of these organizations as semiautonomous governmental actors in a complex and
dynamic public policy system, rather than as agents in a hierarchical, bilateral relationship
with a principal. The term ‘‘democratic performance’’ (Mathur and Skelcher, forthcoming)
is used to describe the metrics for this analysis.
The construction of democratic performance metrics arises from the identification
of the normative obligations on special purpose governments by virtue of their public
role. Integral to the exercise of public purpose is a set of normative obligations concerned
with legitimacy, transparency, due process, responsiveness, accountability, and a host of
other positive virtues. Consequently, democratic performance is a function of the extent
to which these attributes are evident in the design of the governance structure and day-today practices of its board members and public managers. This provides a basis from
which to develop a quantitative set of measures of the formal governance structure,
supplemented by an interpretive approach drawing on qualitative data about actors’
practices.
This strategy borrows from and extends the methodology developed by scholars
concerned with the comparative quality of democracy in national constitutions and governmental systems (Diamond and Morlino 2004). This literature utilizes a criteria-based
approach to develop indicators of democracy normatively associated with a representative
democratic system in which the rule of law is fundamental. National systems are then
measured with reference to these criteria, enabling the degree of compliance to be established. A similar approach is adopted in the civic index developed by the U.S. National
Civic League (Henderson 2003) and the U.S. Governance Performance Project (Ingraham,
Joyce, and Donahue 2003). This method can be employed in the study of semiautonomous
governmental bodies, using an appropriate set of criteria derived from normative standards
of good public governance, but modified to take account of the fact that not all forms of
special purpose government fit neatly into the established representative paradigm or are
constituted as a legal entity.
The research into the democratic performance of quangos in the United Kingdom
(Skelcher 1998; Weir and Hall 1994) provides early examples of the use of this method in
relation to nonmajoritarian bodies. However, in later research on U.K. partnership boards,
it became clear that a criteria-based assessment tells only part of the story. Mathur and
Skelcher
Does Democracy Matter?
GENERATING HYPOTHESES ABOUT DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE
The range of governance designs within the field of special purpose governments offers
a rich empirical base from which to develop and examine theories to explain this variation.
This field is not very well developed on either side of the Atlantic, and there are significant
possibilities for comparative research. A number of hypotheses are suggested. One obvious
comparative hypothesis takes constitutionalism as an independent variable and democratic
performance as the dependent variable:
H1 The stronger constitutionalism inherent in U.S. public administration will result
in a propensity to higher levels of democratic performance on the part of special
purpose governments in the United States than in the United Kingdom.
The theoretical underpinning of this hypothesis is one of path dependency. The hypothesis is that the symbolic and substantive import of the United States’s written constitution is likely to produce a constrained set of designs that exhibit high democratic
performance. There will be a lower level of path dependency in U.K. designs of special
purpose governments because of that nation’s pragmatic governmental culture, in which
tradition and convention provide the points of reference and citizenship rights are not
preeminent.
5
‘‘Democratic Anchorage of Governance Networks in Three European Countries’’ is based at the University of
Birmingham, United Kingdom, and involves collaboration with the Universities of Erasmus (the Netherlands),
Roskilde (Denmark), West of England (United Kingdom), and Zurich (Switzerland). Further details can be found at
http://www.inlogov.bham.ac.uk/research/esrcdemoc.htm (accessed 25 March 2006).
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Skelcher (forthcoming) point out that this approach is limited because it only deals with the
‘‘democratic hardware’’ of formal rules and structures applying to the organization. We
argue that the criteria-based method should be complemented with a methodology to
enable the researcher to gain access to the ‘‘democratic software’’—the day-to-day practices of public administrators and others, in and around these formal structures and rules,
that impinge of the level of democratic performance. The notion of democratic software
rests on an interpretivist position in which a level of democratic performance emerges from
the practices of actors, and specifically the public managers and board members of those
bodies, within the context supplied by the structural form of the institution (Feldman and
Khademian 2005; Yanow 2003). In other words, an actor’s subjective understanding of
democracy is expressed in his or her interactions with others in the context of democratic
hardware and, as a result, is generative of democratic performance. This understanding of
democratic software is particularly important in the study of special purpose governments
because they typically have less well developed democratic structure than elected government and thus offer greater scope for agency. Q-methodology provides a means to access
democratic software by establishing the patterns of attitude and behavior in a population of
actors (Steelman and Maguire 1999). Given an underlying construct ‘‘democracy,’’ we
anticipate that it will be possible to translate the results into ordinal scales that could assist
the production of a measure of democratic performance as an index of the hardware and
software scores. These later stages, however, have yet to be demonstrated and are part of
the current research program.5
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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
This hypothesis can then be developed to draw a link between democratic performance and organizational performance (that is, the organization’s outputs and outcomes):
H2 High levels of democratic performance will be associated with high levels of
organizational performance.
H3 High levels of democratic performance will be associated with well-developed
management systems.
Returning to the distinction between democratic hardware and democratic software
can refine this hypothesis. The empirical research on special purpose governments in the
United Kingdom, discussed above, demonstrates that their democratic hardware is less
extensive, and sometimes considerably so, compared with that applying to elected
representative governments. The limited nature of structure offers scope for agency on
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This hypothesis rests on the notion that organizations whose governance design enables
effective engagement with the democratic environment will see this reflected in high
organizational performance because policies and resources will be in line with community
values, and where they deviate they will be corrected. However, it is important to be aware
of an alternative formulation in which low levels of democratic performance could be
associated with high levels of organizational performance. This could arise where the input
legitimacy assumptions underlying H2 are replaced with output legitimacy assumptions,
following Scharpf’s (1997) distinction.
Nevertheless, this is an important hypothesis since the relationship between democracy and organizational performance remains one of the big unanswered questions in
public administration. Until now we have neither had a population of public organizations
exhibiting sufficiently different levels of democratic performance nor methodologies to
measure this in a quantitative form. Frederickson, Johnson, and Wood’s (2003) work on
the institutional dynamics of city government moves in this direction, but the level of
variation in democratic performance along their five-point schema between ‘‘political’’ and
‘‘administrative’’ forms is relatively small compared with that in the population of special
purpose governments.
The hypothesis could be further refined to take account of the developing literature
within the ‘‘management matters’’ school, drawing particularly on the distinction between
governance capability and administrative capacity (Hou, Moynihan, and Ingraham 2003).
These authors see governance capability as concerned with ‘‘governing structures, incorporating . . . the rules by which political actors credibly bind their own actions and the
actions of others,’’ and they see administrative capacity as the ‘‘policies, procedures and
resources governing administrative action and designed to improve government performance’’ (Hou, Moynihan, and Ingraham 2003, 300). This definition of governance capability has a strong flavor of credible commitment theory, but it could be recast into a form
consistent with the concept of democratic performance. Hou, Moynihan, and Ingraham’s
research found that both the elected and administrative leadership of public organizations
perceived value in management systems as a mechanism to drive performance improvement. High levels of democratic performance would potentially increase the incentives on
the organization’s leadership to establish effective managerial systems because of the
transparency and accountability available to external stakeholders. From this basis, an
indicative hypothesis would be:
Skelcher
Does Democracy Matter?
H4 Public managers in organizations with low levels of democratic hardware will
have a high propensity to develop compensating democratic software.
The four hypotheses outlined thus far appear to create a virtuous circle, in which high
levels of democratic performance (in part due to enhanced software compensating
for weaker hardware), effective public management, and strong organizational performance are in alignment. There are, of course, alternative hypotheses deriving from the
principal-agent framework. A design in which there was a powerful principal (a minister,
mayor, or regulator), and hence low levels of democratic performance, could be argued
to be associated with high organizational performance since management is focused on
meeting the values of a single authoritative actor. Nevertheless, the intention of this article
is to make the case that research into special purpose governments as a field offers the
possibility of moving forward on some of the big empirical questions facing scholars in
public administration. If we find that the hypotheses suggested here do not hold, or
only hold under certain conditions, then the task becomes more interesting at the level
of explanation.
If we factor an institutional design variable into the picture, we begin to build some
additional hypotheses to explain democratic performance.6 Institutional design may be of
at least three forms (Skelcher 2005). In the first place, special purpose governments can be
created by a political principal as a means to secure credible commitment for policy
implementation. This is the classic explanation for quangos or hybrids. Their semiautonomous status secures them from short-term influence by interest groups, citizens, or other
relevant actors, enabling them to engage in long-term strategies to realize initial policy
intent. However there are two other possibilities—clubs and polities. Communities initiate
clubs to meet their specific needs. They are membership organizations created to deliver
mutual benefits. This is not so much about credible commitment to escape public influence,
as a direct expression of that influence. Clubs are a well-established concept in the economics of collective action (Olson 1965), and, given the appropriate legislative capacity,
there is evidence to support the notion that grassroots activity can explain at least some of
the special purpose governments in which we are interested (Foster 1997). Polities are
political communities that form around a governance entity, especially where they have the
right of election of appointment to the board. Here the impetus is not so much mutual
6
The term ‘‘institutional’’ rather than ‘‘organizational’’ design is employed in order to accommodate both
software and hardware aspects of democratic performance.
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the part of public managers and board members. Public managers exist in an environment
that is imbued with imperatives about their role, the place and mission of the organizations
for which they work, and the status of the publics they serve. In recent years, public
management reform programs have been driven by changes to this discursive environment,
for example, in the greater value that is accorded normatively to citizen involvement and
public service performance. There is a developing theoretical and empirical literature on
the role of public administrators as mediators of democratic practice, especially in the
context of new organizational forms and deliberative policymaking (Box 2001; Roberts
2002; Sørensen 2004). Consequently, we might expect to see deficiencies in democratic
hardware compensated by active, democratically oriented strategies of managers that are
reflected in enhanced democratic software:
71
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H5 TAgency-type special purpose governments will have low levels of democratic
performance.
H6 Club-type special purpose governments will have moderate levels of democratic
performance, restricted to a particular constituency.
H7 Polity-type special purpose governments will have high levels of democratic
performance.
An institution explained from a credible commitment perspective would be expected to
have limited democratic performance other than in terms of criteria of accountability
upward to the principal. This would provide insulation from local pressures to subvert
policy objectives determined by the political principal. Bodies identified as a club would
have democratic performance restricted to a particular constituency, since self-interest
holds greater weight than public interest. Institutions explained from a polity-forming
theory would be expected to have a high level of democratic performance because of
the centrality of citizenship rights.
Finally, we need to recognize that special purpose governments exist in a joined-up
world. Their semiautonomous status means that coordination with other agencies will be
carried out through a network, rather than hierarchical or market, mode of governance.
This moves us away from resource dependency and principal-agent approaches and toward
sociological institutionalism and policy discourse theory. Sociological institutionalism
explains the processes through which isomorphism between organizations occurs. Pollitt
(2001) has proposed that this question of isomorphism can be considered in a multileveled
way: in terms of convergence in discourse, decisions, practices, and results. The field of
special purpose governments as a whole is clearly not isomorphic at the practice level,
which is where our discussion of democratic performance is located. However, it can be
argued that special purpose governments operate within a common public management
discourse that currently privileges collaboration and mutuality over isolationism and selfinterest. In the United Kingdom this is the ‘‘partnership’’ discourse, a key element in the
Labour Government’s meta-discourse of ‘‘modernization’’ (Newman 2001). In the United
States the collaborative public management discourse is not as strong, but nevertheless it is
evident in practitioner and academic realms.
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benefits in services, as the citizenship rights to a degree of self-determination that come
from membership of a demos and the potential of the institution to play a role in the wider
governmental process (Chaskin 2003). Debates about the benefits and disbenefits of
mayoral or school board control of U.S. school districts can be seen in this light (Hess
2003; Shipps, Kahne, and Smylie 1999).
However, this rather optimistic hypothesis, which rests on a democratically virtuous
assumption about the interests of public managers, might be reformulated to take account
of theories of bureaucratic self-interest (from a public choice perspective) or agency
capture by special interests in the context of third-party government. As Salamon (2002)
points out, the tools of public action that are being employed at the start of the twenty-first
century are both difficult to manage and hard to keep focused on public objectives. The
desire to formulate parsimonious hypotheses should not distract from the task of establishing alternatives.
This institutional design variable discussed in H4 gives rise to three further hypotheses:
Skelcher
Does Democracy Matter?
73
H8 The catalyzing effect of a discourse of collaboration will result in the construction
of buffers at the symbolic level, leading to an absence of change in the democratic
performance of subsets of special purpose governments.
NEXT STEPS IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT RESEARCH
This article has made two main points. It has argued for public administration scholars to
take the democratic norms, rules, and practices of public organizations and their managers
more seriously. It invites them to ask the question: does democracy matter for public
service performance? A number of scholars have made significant progress on the question of whether management matters. But thus far the discipline has not come to terms
with understanding the impact of variations along the democratic parameter. However,
the conceptualization and methodology of democratic performance assessment are now
developing and provide a new tool for researchers. The second point is that there is a substantial organizational field that is suitable for testing hypotheses on democratic performance. Special purpose governments have been little researched as a whole, even if some
scholars have examined particular segments. The variation in democratic hardware across
the field means that there is the potential to draw conclusions on the question of whether
democracy matters to public service performance.
The U.S. and U.K. public management research communities are now in a position
collaboratively to build on the initial work of the ‘‘governance and performance’’ school and
inject a strong analysis of the democratic dimension. Both research communities now have
a greater interest in comparative analysis. The quantitative orientation of U.S. public management research is complemented by the qualitative flavor that predominates in the United
Kingdom. And the more focused and defined disciplinary boundary in the United States,
which has resulted in considerable in-depth research, is complemented by the tendency to
multidisciplinarity in the United Kingdom. Besides these contextual conditions, the field of
democratic performance and special purpose governments is one in which the contrasts
between the two countries increase the potential for enhanced knowledge generation.
The scale of the research agenda means that the next steps will be incremental. The
strategy has five elements. The methodological developments involved in capturing data on
democratic software and relating these to democratic hardware measures need to be completed and tested through small-scale empirical research on special purpose governments
where there is already some research data. Existing data sources on special purpose governments in the United Kingdom and the United States need to be mapped, and a method should
be designed to extract and supplement, where necessary, data on democratic hardware. The
problem of establishing comparable measures of performance needs to be addressed.7 There
7
I recognize that this is a significant methodological problem, but it has been subject to extensive academic
discussion elsewhere.
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If there are different institutional designs within a common discourse, isomorphism is
likely to be at the symbolic rather than substantive levels. In other words, organizations
will construct language and other artifacts to demonstrate collaboration, but their practice
and performance will remain essentially untouched.
A number of other hypotheses could be generated. Some may not be as optimistic as
those specified above.
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are research design choices about whether large-N analysis can be undertaken or whether
a better approach is selective studies of special purpose governments sampled by type or
within comparable localities. And there is the important question about the theoretical
frameworks that will drive the research questions and data interpretation. This article has
argued that we need to move beyond principal-agent models in the light of the contribution
of network governance perspectives, and it has based several of the hypotheses on this
perspective. However, there is more work to do in order to clarify these issues and establish
a rigorous theory-driven research design.
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