A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?

Christopher Hood, is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and was the Gladstone Professor of Government from 2001 to 2014, and Director of the ESRC Public Services research programme from 2004 to 2010. With Andrew Dunsire, he pioneered the development of 'bureaumetrics' from the late 1970s and was a leading commentator on the emergence of 'New Public Management' in the 1990s.Dr Ruth Dixon, who comes from a natural science background, has worked at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford since 2006, playing a key role in the ESRC Public Services Research Programme before becoming a Research Fellow working on this project since 2010.

• 1. Yesterday's Tomorrows Revisited - the Route to Better and Cheaper Public Services ; 2. The General Background: What Changed and What Didn't in the UK Central Governance Landscape ; 3. Performance Data Breaks: Breaking the Mould and Burying the Evidence ; 4. Did Government Cost Less? Running Costs and Paybill ; 5. Collecting Taxes: Central and Local Government Taxation Compared ; 6. Consistency and Fairness in Administration: Formal Complaints and Legal Challenges ; 7. Comparative Perspectives on Performance ; 8. Government Processes: More Focused and Business-like or Heading into Chaos? ; 9. Not What it Said on the Tin: Assessing Three Decades of Change ; Select Bibliography ; Official Sources Bibliography ; Appendix 1. Anonymised List of Interviewees and Focus Group Members ; Appendix 2. Index of Volatility: Classification of Discontinuities for Chapter Three ; Appendix 3. Dealing with Discontinuities: Methodology for Chapter Four ; Appendix 4. Analysis of Legislative Amendments: Methodology for Chapter Eight

A Government That Worked Better And Cost Less? should be required reading for students of New Public Management. It provides a model of the often frustrating empirical outcomes which result from great theoretical promise.