More rules not less – the interaction between attempts to cut red tape and Performance Management

Critics accuse the public sector for being too bureaucratic and producing too many rules and demanding too much documentation. According to this line of argumentation, employees in the public sector spend the main part of... [ view full abstract ]

Critics accuse the public sector for being too bureaucratic and producing too many rules and demanding too much documentation. According to this line of argumentation, employees in the public sector spend the main part of their time and resources following rules and fulfilling documentation requirements instead of providing service to citizens. There has been implemented many reforms with the attempt to reduce rules and documentation requirements in the public sector – sometime under the label “cutting red-tape”.

At the same time, performance management has been an important part of the reform agenda in the public sector. It was introduced as an alternative to a bureaucratic and rule-based mode of governance. However, instead a large number of objectives, targets, and reporting and documentation requirements replaced rules. As a result, performance management became just as burdensome as the bureaucracy it was supposed to replace. Both performance management and reduction of bureaucracy have been a stable part of different modernization programs in the Danish public sector. At the same time both elements also relates to an ongoing debate about a possible accountability deficit in the public sector

In this paper, we analyze the interaction between performance management and attempts to reduce rules and documentation requirements. We look upon four cases that can be seen as attempt to respectively cutting red tape or reducing documentation requirements. The four cases are presented as part of a modernization scheme reducing rules as well as documentations requirements and simultaneously increasing focus on performance. The four cases are based within the Danish public sector. They are 1) free communes – a number of Danish municipalities has applied the Ministry of Interior from being exempted from a number of rules which on the other hand recently have been introduced as part of larger reforms in various policy areas; 2) Self-inflicted bureaucracy – a initiative by the Ministry of Interior looking into reforms municipalities has imposed on themselves; and 3) the number of documentation requirements placed on the area of daycare and 4) basic education in addition to rules. 

Theoretically, we look upon the two strands of literature on red tape and performance management. Performance management has been criticized for being too comprehensive and including too many goals and performance indicators, e.g. leading to mushrooming or logic of escalation. At the same time the literature on red tape focus on meaningless documentation requirements not positively contributing to the purpose and performance of public organizations. The two strands of literature has been going on simultaneously but in a separate manner. There seems to be dynamics that cutting red tape may lead to increasing requirements on performance and documentation – with consequences for accountability. Thus, we set out to examine these dynamics in the four cases by drawing on the two strands of literature.