Accountability has long been a topic of interest in public administration circles. It is reasonable that the public should be aware of what government does; government agencies should be answerable to elected officials, even given the issues of arbitrariness that can exist in administrative use of discretion (Reddick et al., 2020). Accompanying the New Public Management approach, additional attention has been paid to outcome-based measurement in public sector activities (Wiemann et al., 2019). Still, there can be considerable distance between normative agreement with performance objectives and investment of such principles into an organization’s culture, with sufficient measurement and evaluation to document quality and effectiveness in government programs. Political forces in the United States and elsewhere have made use of individualism, publics that see bureaucracy as deserving of suspicion, if not scorn, and a penchant for indicators and evidence of performance (Raadschelders, 2019). This has left public agencies and their leaders in a predicament: grappling with a demand for consistent, if not constant, justification, but thwarted by limited interest in, or capacity and resources for, measurement and evaluation of their activities. Performance-oriented organizations with powerful champions to sustain such efforts, and a capacity to provide information to internal and external customers in useful ways, may provide exemplars and yield transferrable best practices. Efforts may also fall well short of ideals, and be limited to symbolic rhetoric that lacks follow-through in practice, be given to ritualized evaluation and box-checking, or reflect an environment of politically motivated attacks on administration and its leadership, using biased forms of performance evaluation as a political weapon to further undermine the legitimacy of the administrative state. Performance management activities in implementation and evaluation have been undermined, too, by considerable difficulties in the policy process, including disagreements on problem definition. How a problem is defined affects, for better or worse, the eventual slate of policy choices available, and the measurement of performance of enacted programs (Liu et al., 2020), to the extent that such evaluation efforts exist. Interest in topics of performance management, evaluation, and problem definition is steady if not increasing, in practice and academia. Three recent books with an interest in program design, evaluation, and performance management are featured in this theme-based book review: The Institutionalisation of Evaluation in Europe, edited by Reinhard Stockmann, Wolfgang Meyer, and Lena Taube; Minimum Income Standards and Reference Budgets: International and Comparative Policy Perspectives, edited by Christopher Deeming; and Making Government Work: The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-informed Management, by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene.
