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100 _aHood, Christopher and Piotrowska, Barbara Maria
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245 _aWho loves input controls: What happened to “outputs not inputs” in UK public financial management, and why?
260 _aPublic Administration: An International Quarterly
300 _a10(1), Mar, 2023: p.303-317
520 _aWhy do frequently criticized input controls survive in the management of public spending while apparently more enlightened output/outcome controls come and go? The question matters, because output/outcome controls are often assumed in public financial management and related literature to lead to superior policy performance as compared with input-focused approaches. We tackle the question by applying qualitative push–pull analysis to compare one key type of input controls (administration cost [AC] controls) with one much-discussed form of output/outcome controls (performance targets linked to spending allocations) in one major country case, the United Kingdom, over two decades. Drawing on documents and in-depth interviews with 120 key political and bureaucratic players, we conclude that bureaucratic inertia at most only partially explains the survival of input AC controls in this case. The push/pull factors associated with the politics of blame and credit made the political players fair-weather output controllers but all-weather input controllers. – Reproduced https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padm.12741
773 _aPublic Administration: An International Quarterly
906 _aPUBLIC FINANCE
942 _cAR