Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Public performance & management review 2018-07, Vol.41 (3), p.572-595
Main Authors: Schuelke-Leech, Beth-Anne, Jordan, Sara R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
data
data collection and analysis
Decision making
Federal government
government performance
Intellectuals
Legislators
Performance management
Policy making
Public figures
Public policy
Public sector
Scholarship
Scientists
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Summary:Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance-the statesman's and the scientist's. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.
ISSN:1530-9576
1557-9271
DOI:10.1080/15309576.2018.1456941