Does Democracy Matter? A Transatlantic Research Design on Democratic Performance and Special Purpose Governments

The next big step in public management research is to move beyond the question of whether management matters to answer the question: does democracy matter? The public manage-ment discipline has largely ignored the impact of democratic structure on performance, partly because of limited variation in the constitutional design of public service organizations. Recent growth in the number and types of special purpose governments offers an organi-zational population with a wider distribution on the democratic structure parameter. Conceptual and methodological advances in delimiting and measuring ‘‘democratic performance’ ’ as a function of formal structures and informal practices provide an intellectual infrastructure for scholars. Hypotheses are derived in which democratic performance is either a dependent or independent variable. Differences in contextual variables in the United Kingdom and the United States make transatlantic comparative research a worthwhile prop-osition. A research strategy for generating knowledge on ‘‘does democracy matter?’ ’ is set out. How does the structure and intensity of democratic engagement and supervision affect public service performance? This article proposes a research design, potential data set, an