Competing Values

Over the past several decades, governments have carried out many public administration reforms in order to enhance public sector performance. However, the focus of the research on administrative reforms has been on their adoption and implementation, while their impacts have rarely been carefully tested. At the local level, various reforms are designed, reflecting multiple and sometimes competing values. This study empirically examines the impacts of three major local administrative reforms--e-government, citizen participation and contracting--on three dimensions of local government performance (efficiency, effectiveness, and equity). For the empirical tests, this study carefully reviews the prior studies and measures the three local administrative reforms and their dimensions with data from several national surveys. This study also objectively measures multiple performance variables based on open archival sources, improving on prior studies that largely focused on internal outputs or a single performance dimension. This study finds that (1) three reform areas are usually not associated with efficiency; (2) e-management and administrative participation channels are positively associated with effectiveness; and (3) e-democracy and administrative participation channels are positively associated with equity.