Heterogeneous Commitments: Duration of US Government Contracting Decisions

• In Event: Making Use of the Market: Government Contracts and Outsourcing

Abstract

In recent years, research on government contracting has received considerable attention in the areas of public administration and management. Scholarly attention has focused on the types of contractual arrangements and their implications for public sector performance based on issues such as efficiency, quality of provision of contracted public services, and the like. In this study, we seek to understand the variability in contract lengths offered by U.S. federal agencies when public services are handled by a third-party entity. Specifically, we wish to evaluate whether less politically vulnerable agencies encourage "policy lock-in" consistent with (i.e., independent agency commitments). Or instead, the opposite occurs as longer contracts are associated with the supply of policy benefits from politicians to core constituents and supporters, with the agency serving as the conduit (i.e., politicized agency commitments). We employ a novel database on approximately 17 million government contracting decision from 2001-2016 to evaluate these propositions using recent advances in survival/duration modeling that accounts for heterogeneous conditional relationships across time quantiles. Our aim for this project is to make contributions to the scholarly debate in two areas of public administration: (1) the politics-administration dichotomy along the lines of political accountability (Herman Finer) versus bureaucratic responsibility (Carl Friedrich); (2) yielding new insights on government contracting decisions that complements that can inform what we already know from research analyzing contracting amounts and the management and performance implications of contracting decisions. Specifically, our study can shed light on why some contracting decisions make costly, protracted commitments that impose a burden on governments while other decisions offer weak, short term commitments that governments can easily get out from under.

Authors

• George A. Krause, University of Georgia

• Matthew Zarit, University of Pittsburgh