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Criteria for Evaluating the Effectiveness of State Government1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

W. Brooke Graves
W. Brooke Graves
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

For some time, students of state government and state administration have been puzzled, and perhaps somewhat dismayed, at their inability to measure objectively the accomplishments of the governments of the several states. The same general problem was presented from another angle when, at a round table held in connection with the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago in December, 1936, the attempt was made to measure objectively the results of the administrative reorganization code movement. If standards of achievement could be agreed upon, it might be possible for different investigators, working independently, to examine the same states with similar or comparable results. It should, likewise, be possible to compare the government of a given state before and after the adoption of a code providing for administrative reorganization, and to compare with some degree of accuracy the governments of states of similar size, population, industrial characteristics, etc.

Type
American Government and Politics
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , June 1938 , pp. 508 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1938

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References

2 American State Government (Boston, 1936), pp. 59–63Google Scholar.

3 Clarence E. Ridley has done a good deal with the problem of measurement in the municipal field; see, for instance, his series on measurement standards, done with Herbert Simon, A., in Public Management, Feb., Mar., and following, 1937Google Scholar.

4 For the first purpose, see Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 14, 15, and 16; for the second, Nos. 1, 2, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16.

5 See, for instance, in agriculture, Gilbert, Arthur W., What's What of State Departments of Agriculture (mimeographed, 1928)Google Scholar; in education, the criteria used by the United States Office of Education and the National Education Association for rating purposes; in highways, comparative data on highway safety; and in welfare, the state-by-state series issued by the Works Progress Administration, Social Research Division, covering analysis of constitutional provisions affecting public welfare, digest of the public welfare provisions under the laws, and organization and procedure of the department of public welfare.

6 See, for instance, Jacobson, J. Mark, “Evaluating State Administrative Structure—the Fallacy of the Statistical Method”, in this Review, NOV., 1928, pp. 928–935Google Scholar.

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