Made2Measure

The design of international development is ill-suited for our fast-paced world. It is not unusual for aid programs to take five or more years from blueprint to start-up and another five years for results to be reported, and even more time for the results to be “translated” into policy.   How Scientists Should Act Writing in the February 10, 2017 issue of Science , Erik Stockstad summarizes the message of Paul Cairney, a political scientist at the University of Stirling in the UK, author of the book, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making . Cairney’s message is for those scientists who want their findings to find their way into policy: Data does not speak for itself.   Scientists should be “sifters, synthesizers, and analyzers” to make the evidence “speak.” Cairney repeats the common refrain of policy-makers: “I don’t have the time to consider all the information. How do I decide?” Policymaking is disorderly. Scientists need to dispense with the notion t...

The question How Are We Performing? lies at the heart of self-governance and effective leadership of courts. The capacity and political will to address this self-directed question regularly and continuously using the tools of performance measurement is the hallmark of a successful court organization. More and more court leaders and managers are turning to performance measurement to drive success. However, the trend is on a slow march impeded by two entrenched ways the judicial sector has tended to measure its success: (1) reliance on third-party monitoring and evaluations of court performance; and adherence to a research paradigm for assessing court performance. Self-governance, transparency, and accountability of courts will depend on the degree to which these two impediments are attenuated. Court leaders will need to champion and support the self-assessment of performance by courts, instead of relying on third party evaluations. They will need to seek the replacement of the metho...

Technology advances will dramatically change the way we do performance measurement and performance management (i.e., the use of performance information in  managements) over the next decade in what I call the "third wave" of court performance measurement. Writing in a special issue of Public Administration Review, the Urban Institute's Harry Hatry predicts that over the next decade managers and their staff will have an enormous amount of performance data at their fingertips.  They will be able to drill through various layers of highly aggregated data to disaggregated data, and slice and dice that data at will. Executives, managers and staff will have access to real-time cross-tabulations of outcomes for numerous variables.  For example, service user satisfaction outcome data might be calculated and displayed for various combinations of variables including identity of user (e.g., litigant, witness, juror), case type that brought users to court, gender, race/ethnicity...

As a social scientist who has spent the last several years in developing countries learning empathy -- mostly to shut up and to listen carefully to what my counterparts have to say, something I was trained to do but often have failed to do -- I was heartened by Joshua A. Dijksman’s deep bow (Views, International Herald Tribune , April 23) to the “rights and duties to science and society” that serious researchers bear. Like Dr. Dijksman, I too believe that the scientific method – careful observation, objectivity, patience, modesty, replication, and only drawing conclusions based on very reliable data – can be the very “epitome of humanity” that can lift us all above the prejudices, slander, downright lies and rumors and the kind of “disingenuous, small-minded social keelhauling” that serves as public discourse and much of policy these days.