Does performance information receive political attention?

Abstract

AbstractThis study examines whether performance information affects the political agenda. I offer and test two hypotheses on performance information in politics—the attention‐allocation hypothesis, suggesting that politicians leverage performance data to devote attention to problems in service delivery, and the politicization hypothesis, stating that political concerns alter elected officials focus on performance information. I examine the hypotheses by gathering administrative data on pupils' standardized test scores combined with more than 6000 min of meetings in Danish municipal school committees, on which I leverage two‐way fixed effects models. The results show that performance shortfalls receive political attention, regardless of the politicization of the environment. In contrast to a vast literature stating how the political context alters attention to performance information, these results demonstrate that political entities leverage performance data to discover problems in need of attention in ways similar to those of other types of organizations.