Shifting the ‘goal’ post – what does your politician want you to want for yourself?

Vinayak Kishore, FPM II, Public Systems Group Area

Data! Data! Data! – as Mr. Holmes would put it, today’s policy world is driven by quantities. Crisp, something you can grasp, something you can point a finger at and something you can measure. And what gets measured, gets managed. Data allows public organizations and departments to set tangible targets and measure their own success. It allows elected officials to allocate scarce resources among competing policy goals. Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, carbon reduction goals, annual performance goals, and many more, the list is endless. We know from prior research that the ideological beliefs of individuals may force them to interpret the same piece of information, or measurement of performance, differently, to suit their own, strongly held belief systems. But what happens when goals are in conflict with each other? Does education deserve a rupee more than health? Does defence trump both of them? How do political leaders decide which goals are more important or worthy of attention than others? A group of researchers have recently published a fascinating research in the Journal of Public Administration Research And Theory, which has experimentally demonstrated an interesting aspect of decision makers’ behaviour. They have demonstrated, successfully, that when decision makers are faced with competing information regarding policy goals (or goal preferences), they change their goal preferences to suit their ideological preferences (or governance preferences)!

The researchers of the study conducted an interesting experiment with a sample of 988 Danish city councillors. After recording their governance preference regarding public or private provisioning of services, the councillors were asked to rate the performance of two fictitious schools by rating them higher/lower along two indicators – student well-being and grades. The councillors were divided into four groups. The first two groups were given exactly opposite set of information, without telling them the ideological affiliation of the schools (that is, whether the schools were public or private institutions). It was found that councillors with a preference for public provisioning of education or public schools, believed that student well-being was more important than grades in determining the performance of a school. The councillors with a preference for private schools reflected that grades were more important in determining the performance of a school. The next two groups of councillors were given this same information about the same fictitious schools, but their affiliations (public or private) were revealed. The results showed fascinating findings about the behaviour of the councillors.

It was found by the researchers that when the affiliations of the schools were revealed, the councillors actually re-worked the importance they assigned to student well-being or grades, in order to show that the school of their preference was performing better! So, for example, if I as a councillor prefer public provisioning of schools rather than private provisioning of schools, and the data given to me shows that the public school is performing better than private school in terms of student well-being, I would rate student well-being as a more important factor than grades in determining the performance of a school. If I find that the public school is performing better on grades as compared to the private school, I would suitably change my preference, and would state that grades are a more important factor in determining the performance of a school. Similarly, the councillors with a preference for private schools were found to be switching, or as the researchers call it, ‘reprioritizing’ their goals in order to ensure that their ideological beliefs (or governance preference) and their goals are consistent with each other. It was also found that those councillors who were ideology agnostic (neither public nor private or equally predisposed towards both), did not demonstrate this tendency of reprioritization strongly, thereby supporting the earlier results for the other two groups. Wow! So, what do we make of it?

Well, the study states that individuals indulge in goal switching or reprioritization to maintain a façade of objectivity. The authors interpret their results to indicate that there might be a case for restricting the ‘goal-post shifting’ or goal reprioritization capability of our elected representatives, by forcing them to rank their goal preferences beforehand and holding them accountable for it. But they also suggest that this can very well be contested, as it completely robs the decision maker of any autonomy whatsoever. We can never be sure whether the decision makers have been elected to pursue only policy goals and pay no attention to ideology or governance preferences. For example, an electorate might want to be governed via public provisioning of health and education, even if it might imply goal reprioritization on the part of their elected representatives. The study also shows that more data or more information might not necessarily mean better decision making. Ideology can still trump data! The authors also suggest that even when this might be the case, data-based decision making might still be relevant in ideology-neutral settings, like bureaucracies.   

For the original paper, please refer to:

Christensen, J., Dahlmann, C. M., Mathiasen, A. H., Moynihan, D. P., & Petersen, N. B. G. (2018). How Do Elected Officials Evaluate Performance? Goal Preferences, Governance Preferences, and the Process of Goal Reprioritization. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 28(2), 197–211. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muy001