Assessing the Impact of Performance Budgeting: A Survey of American States.

This article summarizes the findings of a survey on how performance measurement has influenced state budgeting regarding budget actors, budget cycles, and the perception of government by the media and citizens.

Over the past decade, state governments have established legal and administrative requirements for performance-based budgeting systems that incorporate requirements for measuring and reporting agency and program performance results. Such systems require stronger roles for planning and goal setting, and stipulate the conduct of performance measurement and reporting about program results.

This article addresses state government budget officers' perceptions of the importance of performance measurement and performance-based budgeting (PBB) in particular. It investigates how and when performance measurement information is used in decisions about spending by this select group of budget actors. This research should be helpful to governments as they begin to experiment with methods of presenting indicators externally via financial and program reports in order to provide stakeholders (citizens, other governments, investors, etc.) with reliable information about their performance.

Methodology

The data reported in this research represents one component of a major study of performance measurement used in state and local governments. The study is part of a multi-year effort by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) to extend its SEA Research project. Funded by the Sloan Foundation, more than 30 case studies (1999) and a major mail survey (2000) were conducted by the GASB Performance Measurement Research Team. Overall, the project focused on the depth and breadth of the actual use of performance measures by governments for budgeting, management, and reporting.

For the mail survey, 121 questionnaires were mailed to budget offices and 434 were sent to heads of selected agencies in all 50 states. In addition, more than 700 questionnaires were sent to budget officers and department heads in local governments across the country. Overall, 1,311 survey instruments were mailed out and 491 received, for a response rate of 37 percent. This article is limited to questions related to budgetary decision making by state budget officers. Thus, the findings are based on a subset of subjects of the mailed survey; the research is concentrated on 62 responses from executive and legislative budget offices in the 50 states, representing a 51 percent response rate for that group. This subset includes responses from 37 states, with 15 states providing responses from both the executive and legislative branch budget offices. Admittedly this is a small sample. However, the subjects represent a very specialized budget actor (the executive or legislative budget officer) who retains a global view of the budget process and the use of performance indicators across many agencies and programs during such a process.

Integrating Performance Measurement