The Administrative and Academic Politics of Ranking Research: The Case of the 2004 “Public Sector Performance” Study in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT In contrast to the other analyses of rankings in this issue, this paper concentrates on analyzing a single specific case of a rankings exercise from the “inside,” in large part relying on documents produced by observer participation. The case that is analyzed in depth is an exercise conducted by the Dutch government in the early 2000s to produce a critical comparison and de facto ranking of public sector performance in the industrialised countries. The paper examines the production process which culminated in the publication of “Public Sector Performance” by the Dutch Social Cultural Planning Office (SCP) in 2004, and in particular the interactions between the civil servants of the SCP and the outside academic body in Belgium that the SCP commissioned to produce the “public administration” component of the ranking exercise. On the basis of this “inside” analysis, the paper describes how the SCP ranking analysis of public administration was conducted, and examines the process from three complementary and overlapping analytic perspectives drawn from the literature on the politics of evaluation research. Those perspectives are: how supply interacts with demand for ranking surveys, how the “management of meaning” played out in this case, and how culture shapes ranking surveys. The paper shows that in this case the “Say's law” principle of analytic supply leading to political demand did not apply and that there was a mismatch between demand for and supply of public administration indicators. It also shows how ranking exercises can develop in a politico-administrative culture often said to be much more predisposed to “soft consensus” in its operation than that applying in less “consociational” administrative cultures.