Public Policy and Administration

The increasing availability of statistical data raises opportunities for ‘big’ data and learning analytics. Here, we review the academic literature and research relating to the use of big data analytics in the public sector, and its contribution to public organizations’ performance and efficiency. We outline the advantages as well as the limitations of using big data in public sector organizations and identify research gaps in recent studies and interesting areas for future research.

A number of studies have considered the evaluation of efficiency in higher education institutions. In this paper, we focus on the issue of revenue efficiency, in particular ascertaining the extent to which, given output prices, producers choose the revenue maximising vector of outputs. We then relax the price taking assumption to consider the case in which the market for some outputs is characterised by monopolistic competition. We evaluate efficiencies for English institutions of higher education for the academic year 2012–13 and find considerable variation across institutions in revenue efficiency. The relaxation of the price-taking assumption leads to relatively small changes, in either direction, to the estimated revenue efficiency scores. A number of issues surrounding the modelling process are raised and discussed, including the determination of the demand function for each type of output and the selection of inputs and outputs to be used in the model.

Measuring public service effectiveness has become a central issue for public authorities worldwide, often driven by governmental pressures to ensure value for money. In this context, social media data represent a potential powerful tool in the hands of public authorities to support the evaluation of public service performance. By relying on an action research project in the higher education field, this study explores how social media data can contribute to measure service effectiveness by focusing specifically on Twitter in the higher education field. The final aim of the paper is to develop a set of measures, derived from Twitter data, to quantify the effectiveness of higher education services. This investigation supports a broader discussion about the extent to which social media data can contribute to performance measurement in the public sector.

This article focuses on the role of political parties for policy making, and it traces the development from party preferences over coalition positions to policy proposals. The main argument is that parties with more similar preferences agree on more encompassing sets of policies, and that if a coalition formulates a policy in its agreement the chances for a policy proposal are higher. However, the need to negotiate the coalition agreement with other parties mediates the influence of partisan preferences. The article is based on a qualitative content analysis of documents as well as expert interviews from three West European countries and focuses on higher education policy. The results show preferences of governing parties influence policy proposals also in situations of coalition government. Furthermore, coalition agreements are found to be central documents in policy making as they limit veto capacities and indicate where substantial policy change is likely.