Winner: W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize
A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?
Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government
Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the 2015 Louis Brownlow Book Award Winner of the 2016 W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize awarded by the Political Studies Association
"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." - Tom Thatcher, LSE Review of Books
"it [the book] has accomplished a truly Herculean labor...Rich in statistics and graphs, the book sets out to prove that, contrary to myth, NPM has not produced a government that costs less and works better, quite the opposite, in fact. To back their argument up, the authors of the book have taken pains to explain their methods and approach and how conclusions are reached." - Demetrios Argyriades, City University of New York and Pan Suk Kim, Yonsei University. Governance
"This is an important book. At a time when there is a great need for evidence-based policy,A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? makes a major contribution to our knowledge about the effects of New Public Management (NPM) reforms." - Per Laegrid, University of Bergen, Governance
"This study is notable for the important question it addresses, the methods it devises for dealing with data breaks and discontinuities, the data series it constructs, and the results it produces." - Nancy Roberts, Naval Post-Graduate School, Governance