576 Public Administration Review • May| June 2008

Patricia W. Ingraham and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., eds.,

Th e Art of Governance: Analyzing Management and

Administration (Washington, DC: Georgetown Univer-

sity Press, 2004). 256 pp. $26.95 (paper), ISBN:

9781589010345.

Eran Vigoda-Gadot and Aaron Cohen, Citizenship and

Management in Public Administration: Integrating

Behavioral Th eories and Managerial Th inking

(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004). 352 pp.

$140.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978184376498.

A few months ago I attended a grand, invitation-

only weekend conference at Ditchley Park in

England. Th e company consisted of senior

British politicians from all the major political parties,

plus an impressive collection of those who had held

high offi ce in government, the diplomatic service, and

the military. Th ose eminences had come together to

work out a route to “better government,” in light of

accumulating discontentment with the performance

of the British government in recent years. I decided

that my own role, as one of three academics sneaked

into the proceedings, should be to periodically remind

this august company of two uncomfortable truths.

One was that “evidence” about the quality of govern-

ment should not automatically be equated with the

strongly held opinions of individuals in high offi ce,

however eminent they might be. Th e other was that

England was not the only country in the world — or

even in the United Kingdom — facing quality of gov-

ernment issues and with experience relevant to their

deliberations.

So I turned to Th e Art of Governance in high hopes

that it would provide me with just the sort of ammu-

nition that I needed for that rather uphill task. After

all, this book aims to contribute to knowledge about

better governance by using systematic data analysis

combined with explicit modeling to examine what

diff erence institutional and managerial factors make

to public service outcomes. Th at, broadly, is what the

editors mean by the “governance framework,” of

which a representative example is the proposition put

forward by Kenneth J. Meier and Laurence J.

O’Toole, Jr., in the form,

O t = �

1 ( S

1 + M

1 ) O

t − 1 + �

2 ( X

t ) ( S

x ) ( M

3 / M

4 ) + e

t ,

where O denotes outcome, S stands for stability, the

M s denote management divided into various parts, X

stands for environmental forces, e is an error term, the

� s are estimable parameters, and the other subscripts

refer to time periods.

I didn’t show that equation to those politicians and

high public servants assembled at Ditchley, though

if I had summoned up the courage to do so, I think

I could have eventually persuaded most of them that

such factors did indeed represent many of the things

they were intuitively identifying as important for the

quality of government. And as well as more abstract

analysis, Th e Art of Governance contains some impres-

sive middle-range analyses of specifi c policy problems,

including excellent work on substance abuse treat-

ment programs (by Carolyn J. Heinrich) and welfare-

to-work programs (by Carolyn J. Hill). Even though

these analyses are all taken from the United States,

meaning that their broader signifi cance is unknown,

this material represents just the sort of systematic

analysis of what aff ects performance that was mostly

missing from those Ditchley discussions. Applied

analysis relating public service performance on a range

of indicators to other institutional features is certainly

one of the major developments in public management

and administration over the past generation, and from

a few pioneer works (such as Ostrom, Parks, and

Whitaker’s Policing Metropolitan America of 30-odd

years ago, which related indicators of police perfor-

mance to institutional features such as degree of com-

petition among police forces), it has grown into an

impressive epistemic industry. For anyone who came

into public administration, as I did, 40 or so years

ago, the development of such studies represents re-

markable progress. Th at progress has undoubtedly

been fueled by an institutional environment in which

Naomi Caiden, Editor Christopher Hood University of Oxford

Data Analysis and Citizenship Focus: Analytic Master Keys to

Better Governance?

Christopher Hood is the Gladstone

Professor of Government and a fellow of All

Souls’ College, University of Oxford. He is

the director of the Economic and Social

Research Council’s Public Services Research

Programme and specializes in the study of

executive government, regulation, and

public sector reform. He was awarded the

Public Management Research Association’s

2007 Frederickson Award for Career

Contributions to Public Management

Research.

E-mail: christopher.hood@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

Book Reviews

Book Reviews 577

ever-more performance data is coming to be used in

public services and government, though it also con-

tributes to the growth of such indicators by showing

what can be learned from them.

But the Ditchley meeting also revealed the limitations

of the approach, or at least of its application to date. It

works best for fairly discrete areas in which large com-

parative data sets are available, in fi elds such as job

placement or drug treatment services, and the cases

chosen in this book play to its strengths. But no one

has yet shown us a way to use it for the sort of perfor-

mance issues the Ditchley group was discussing, such

as the determinants of long-term strategic capacity in

foreign aff airs from cross-national analysis.

Now that beguiling equation could, in principle, be

applied to such questions, and indeed part of its con-

siderable strength is that it is intended to be a go-

anywhere, do-anything formulation. But for the time

being, its application to the sort of questions the

Ditchley group was discussing seems to be as a public

management version of Maxwell’s demon (a famous

thought experiment of some 140 years ago by the

great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who

posited an imaginary entity that could act as a gate-

keeper between two isolated chambers of gas, inspect-

ing each individual molecule and putting diff erent

kinds of molecules in diff erent chambers, in a way

that Maxwell argued could violate the second law of

thermodynamics). Th at is, such equations represent

an instructive way of formalizing what we know we

don’t know, imagining the data we would need to

answer the question about what shapes outcomes and

for careful reasoning in thought experiments of that

kind.

But when I tried to fi t the analysis of Citizenship and

Management in Public Administration into Meier and

O’Toole’s equation, I wasn’t sure whether it repre-

sented something for which we would need another

M variable in the equation, or whether it really be-

longed in the S or X parts of the equation, or all of the

above in some form. Th at’s because Eran Vigoda-

Gadot and Aaron Cohen aim to put “citizenship

behavior” into the center of the frame for thinking

about contemporary public administration, and argue

that it is missing from the mainstream New Public

Management movement and related ideas (“citizen-

ship” is certainly missing from the index of the Art of

Governance ). Vigoda-Gadot and Cohen do not cite

Meier and O’Toole’s equation as a case in point, but

perhaps they could have done. Th ey claim that citi-

zenship and citizenship behavior (which they defi ne as

extra eff ort exhibited by individuals for the sake of

other fellow workers or for the organization as a

whole, and thus for citizens as well) is something

largely ignored by the public administration and

management literature but that it can improve

management theory’s generally poor accounts of orga-

nizational performance. Th is is an important claim,

though perhaps an exaggerated one. After all, Vincent

Ostrom’s Th e Intellectual Crisis in American Public

Administration, written more than 30 years ago, which

is not cited at all, was precisely an attempt to develop

a citizen-centered approach to public administration

(on what Ostrom claimed to be classic foundations).

It has long been a stylistic cliché of American writing

in public administration to use the word “citizens” to

describe the individuals with whom government

interacts. And there are plenty of European classics

that could have been cited, too. But we have no refer-

ence to Rousseau on Poland or the ideas of the Paris

Commune in this book either.

Should the great and the good at that Ditchley event

have based their thinking about better governance on

the ideas in this book? At fi rst sight, they might well

have been attracted to it. Better governance surely

starts — or ends — at the point at which government in

all its various institutional forms meets individuals.

And the failures of public bureaucracies often turn

precisely on the absence of what Vigoda-Gadot and

Cohen call citizenship behavior — notably, failures

to cooperate eff ectively and to share information.

A “citizenship” view of life in public bureaucracies

certainly contrasts sharply with the dominant

“principal – agent” view of the bureaucratic manage-

ment problem, and a useful chapter by Aaron Cohen,

Yair Zalmanovitch, and Hani Davidesko on what

prompts graduates to choose public sector over private

sector work might provide some support for the

“sorting” theory that is emerging as an alternative to

the conventional principal – agent view that has domi-

nated analysis for a generation. Th ere are interesting

links to be explored between citizenship behavior and

high-reliability theory as it applies to the public sector,

too, for instance, in armed forces and emergency

services (though neither of those is considered here).

But the alternative view to the citizenship approach to

bureaucracy — that representative democracy essen-

tially depends on treating bureaucrats as agents rather

than citizens — is rather downplayed, the analysis

at times seems distinctly one-sided and the account

of so-called New Public Management (which is pre-

sented as both a problem and opportunity for the

citizenship approach) is both stipulative and shifting.

Moreover, the limits of the citizenship view of the

world are encountered as governments increasingly

fi nd themselves dealing with individuals who are not

full citizens in any formal or legal sense — including

those who are citizens by birth but have lost full citi-

zenship rights (prisoners) or have not yet gained them

(children); those who are not citizens by birth but

have certain legally recognized rights, for example, to

reside and work, and may be regarded as on the road

to full citizenship (legal immigrants); and those who

578 Public Administration Review • May | June 2008

are not citizens by birth and have no legally recog-

nized rights other than those of international human

rights law (illegal immigrants). Many of the problems

that the Ditchley group was talking about turned

precisely on the diffi culties posed for modern govern-

ments by the need to deal increasingly with individu-

als of these various kinds who are not full citizens. But

that would require a recognition that for better or

worse a single (rather rosy-tinted) view of citizenship

will not suffi ce as an analytic basis for modern public

administration.

Both of these books have important things to say

about how we can analyze and evaluate modern gover-

nance, though both are essentially culture free and

therefore, it might be argued, have either ignored the

central problem of government today or to have

smuggled it in through the back door (in one of those

X or M variables in Meier and O’Toole’s equation).

Neither could have provided a convincing overall

answer to the Ditchley group’s problem, and they do

not fi t well together. But both certainly could have

provided part of the answer.

References Ostrom , Elinor , Roger B . Parks , and Gordon P .

Whitaker . 1977 . Policing Metropolitan America .

Washington, DC : National Science Foundation .

Ostrom , Vincent . 1973 . Th e Intellectual Crisis in

American Public Administration . University,

AL : University of Alabama Press .

Donald J. Maletz University of Oklahoma