Measuring government effectiveness is essential to ensuring
accountability, as is an informed public that is willing and able
to hold elected officials and policy-makers accountable. There are
various forms of measurement, including against prior experience or
compared to some ideal. In Yardstick Competition among Governments,
Pierre Salmon argues that a more effective and insightful approach
is to use common measures across a variety of countries, state, or
other relevant political and economic districts. This facilitates
and enables citizens comparing policy outputs in their own
jurisdictions with those of others. An advantage of this approach
is that it reduces information asymmetries between citizens and
public officials, decreasing the costs of monitoring by the former
of the latter -along the lines of principal-agent theory. These
comparisons can have an effect on citizens' support to incumbents
and, as a consequence, also on governments' decisions. By
increasing transparency, comparisons by common yardsticks can
decrease the influence of interest groups and increase the focus on
broader concerns, whether economic growth or others. Salmon takes
up complicating factors such as federalism and other forms of
multi-level governance, where responsibility can become difficult
to disentangle and accountability a challenge. Salmon also
highlights the importance of publics with heterogeneous
preferences, including variations in how voters interpret their
roles, functions, or tasks. This results in the coexistence within
the same electorate of different types of voting behavior, not all
of them forward-looking. In turn, when incumbents face such
heterogeneity, they can treat the response to their decisions as an
aggregate non-strategic relation between comparative performance
and expected electoral support. Combining theoretical,
methodological, and empirical research, Salmon demonstrates how
yardstick competition among governments, a consequence of the
possibility that citizens look across borders, is a very
significant, systemic dimension of governance both at the local and
at the national levels.
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