New from Stephane Lavertu and Don Moynihan:

A central purpose of performance management reforms such as the Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) is to promote the use of performance information in federal agencies. But reforms initiated by partisan political actors may be pursued differently, and may face relatively more obstacles, in agencies whose programs or personnel are associated with divergent political ideologies.

But the key bit is this:

Using data from a survey of federal agency managers, our analysis indicates that the impact of PART on managers’ use of performance information is largely contingent on the political ideology of the agencies in which managers work. Managers involved with the PART review process report greater performance information use than those not involved if they work in politically moderate and, especially, conservative agencies.

This is hot off the press, but already I’m waiting for someone to replicate this using a decision environment other than the Bush Administration.