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: Objective: To conduct a real‐time audit to assess a Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) activity to improve the quality of public health data in the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) Public Health Unit during the first wave of COVID‐19. Methods: A real‐time audit of the Notifiable Conditions Information Management System was conducted for positive cases of COVID‐19 and their close contacts from SLHD. After recording missing and inaccurate data, the audit team then corrected the data. Multivariable regression models were used to look for associations with workload and time. Results: A total of 293 cases were audited. Variables measuring completeness were associated with improvement over time (p Conclusion: Utilising a team, separate from operational staff, to conduct a real‐time audit of data quality is an efficient and effective way of improving epidemiological data. Implications for public health: Implementation of CQI in a public health unit can improve data quality during times of stress. Auditing teams can also act as an intervention in their own right to achieve high‐quality data at minimal cost. Together, this can result in timely and high‐quality public health data., SARS‐COV‐2, the virus that causes COVID‐19, was first reported in December 2019 in China.[sup.1,2] It has since spread around the world, with the first case reported in Australia on 25 [...]

Introduction Compared with White Americans, African Americans exhibit lower levels of trust in government. However, there is a dearth of research that seeks to explain that group's level of political [...]

Thank you, Bill Chameides. I will tell you how I'm going to spend my birthday: I'm going to testify in the morning before Senator Bingaman and the Senate Committee on [...]

Public agencies are increasingly viewed as performing their functions in partnership with other public, nonprofit, and private sector actors, with many public services the joint products of collaborations of governmental [...]

Evaluating public agency performance has typically been based on objective measurements. However, some researchers contend that evaluation is not complete without considering client perceptions of agency performance. This study supports combining subjective client perceptions with objective data in the evaluation process. Survey results and internal performance data are examined for a state agency charged with investigating citizen disputes with utility companies. Regression analyses show that the factors that most influence the client's satisfaction with agency performance are the client's perception of how long it took to resolve the dispute, based on survey results, and whether the case was decided in the client's favor, from the agency's internal records. The 'real' resolution time recorded in the agency's information system was not significant. These results indicate that subjective data provide valuable information for evaluating agency performance.

Few studies have empirically assessed the factors that affect government agencies' public responsiveness from a public management perspective. This article tests a preliminary model that explains the level of public responsiveness with variables about external political environments and internal organizational characteristics. The hypotheses are tested with survey data from state health and human service agencies. The results show that the support of elected officials, the influence of the public and media, and decentralization of decision making have a positive impact on public responsiveness. Results-based management changes have a quadratic [intersection]-shaped relation with public responsiveness. Further, the influence of client groups has a negative impact on public responsiveness. KEYWORDS: government organizations, organizational structure, public responsiveness, results-based management

The article examines reactivity, the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being observed, evaluated or measured. It indicates that these public measures change expectations and institutions.

We study how satisfaction with service delivery affects trust in public agencies in an empirical setting. Our basic assumption is that the causal relation between satisfaction and trust cannot be fruitfully analyzed unless the measures are controlled for a common component, which we identify, as the predisposition toward government. The empirical results suggest that the impact of a negative experience with a public agency is much more pronounced than the effect of a positive one. Decreasing the number of disappointed clients will, therefore, have a stronger effect on increasing trust in the public sector than increasing the number of (already) well-pleased clients: Trust comes on foot and goes away on horseback. KEYWORDS: client satisfaction, performance, public services, service delivery, trust in government

If academic research on performance measurement is to benefit the wider global community, an examination of its implementation under various contexts is vital. This paper, which focuses on the performance measurement systems of Australian and Hong Kong government departments, aims to just do this. Although both countries adopt an outputs-and-outcomes performance measurement framework, Australia's devolved approach to performance measurement contrasts that that of Hong Kong's centralized approach. This paper evaluates their performance measurement systems against five commonly recommended criteria for performance measures: validity, legitimacy, credibility, public accessibility, and functionality. Several criteria were found to interact with one another, suggesting that one cannot always get away with focusing on some of the features in a performance measurement system at the expense of other features. The similarities and differences found in the performance measurement systems between both countries are also discussed. KEYWORDS: Australia, Hong Kong, performance measurement

Byline: Alberto Alesina (1), Arnaud Devleeschauwer (1), William Easterly (2), Sergio Kurlat (3), Romain Wacziarg (4) Keywords: ethnic heterogeneity; growth; government quality Abstract: We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the effects of ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity on the quality of institutions and growth. We partly confirm and partly modify previous results. The patterns of cross-correlations between potential explanatory variables and their different degree of endogeneity makes it hard to make unqualified statements about competing explanations for economic growth and the quality of government. Our new data, which features the underlying group structure of ethnicities, religions and languages, also allows the computation of alternative measures of heterogeneity, and we turn to measures of polarization as an alternative to the commonly used index of fractionalization. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA (2) New York University and Center for Global Development, 269 Mercer Street, New York, NY, 10003, USA (3) The World Bank, 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC, 20433, USA (4) Stanford Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA Article History: Registration Date: 06/10/2004

The author evaluates the usefulness of national human rights institutions in protecting human rights.

Efforts to implement the Government Performance and Results Act have brought about comprehensive discussions between Congress and government agencies. Prior to the passage of this bill, the legislative and executive branches were virtually ignorant of the issues faced by the other branch. As legislators became responsible for reviewing the performance of administrative agencies, it became a necessity for them to be knowledgeable about the mission and procedures of these agencies. The dialogues between the two branches illuminated the areas that needs improvement., The Government Performance and Results Act has produced an added side benefit: Congress and the agencies are working more closely together. The relations between the legislative and executive branches have [...]

Harold Seidman has called interagency committees 'the crabgrass in the garden of government.' They are universally condemned, but efforts to extirpate them seldom succeed, for new committees grow in their [...]

Philip K. Howard's 'The Death of Common Sense' and Justice Stephen Breyer's 'Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation' offer comments on the ways which modern government performs its duties. Although both Howard and Breyer express confidence in government, they believe that it lacks the mind to make reasonable decisions, which ultimately produces irrational results. They suggest that bureaucrats be given more flexibility in decision making to deal effectively with issues addressed by modern regulation.

Is performance monitoring in public programs feasible and worthwhile? Joseph S. Wholey and Harry P. Hatry argue that it is and support their thesis with examples from a range of national, state, and local governments. After addressing some of the barriers to effective performance monitoring, they call for actions that would increase its use at all levels of government.

Warren Rudman was riding in a taxi September 11 listening to public radio when he heard that terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Center. The former Republican senator from New [...]

A study investigated performance auditing within an organizational and political setting. The analysis focused on the development of the technology of performance auditing from 1973-1998 within one research site, the Australian National Audit Office. The research aimed to determine the degree to which performance auditing is a malleable social construct, ass opposed to prior attempts to define it as an invariable technical practice.