Performance Regimes in Health Care

Institutions, Critical Junctures and the Logic of Escalation in England and the Netherlands

Bibliographic Data

ID12567553
AuthorsChristopher Pollitt (Public Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium,, corresponding author), Stephen Harrison (0000-0001-5951-3300, National Primary Care Research and Development Centre, University of Manchester, UK, stephen.harrison@ manchester.ac.uk), George Dowswell (National Primary Care Research and Development Centre, University of Manchester, UK,, corresponding author), Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent (0000-0003-2804-1763, Erasmus Medical Centre, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, The Netherlands, corresponding author), Roland Bal (0000-0001-7202-5053, Erasmus Medical Centre, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, The Netherlands, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume16
Issue1
Pages13-29
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEvaluation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1356-3890 • E-ISSN: 1461-7153
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1356389009350026
OpenAlexW2117109215
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited29

The Netherlands and England are near neighbours whose health care systems have much in common and whose health policy communities have also usually been well aware of what is going on in the other country. Nevertheless, for the two decades from 1982, England adopted and repeatedly redeveloped performance indicator (PI) systems in the health care field while the Netherlands virtually shunned them. A broad institutional explanation for this divergence is provided by England’s majoritarian and adversarial political system that leaves governments with fewer constraints and compromises than in the more consociational Dutch system. More recently, however, a Dutch national system of health care PIs has appeared, suggesting that this explanation needs to be supplemented. This paper draws on an empirical study of PI systems in the two countries over the period from 1982 to 2007 to suggest that two further factors are at work. Established institutional patterns may be disrupted by ‘punctuations’, while technical and political factors endogenous to PI systems may exert a logic of their own

Divergence (linguistics · Economics · Health care · Healthcare system · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public economics · Sociology · Work (physics · Healthcare Policy and Management · Healthcare Quality and Management · Law · Primary Care and Health Outcomes · Public Administration

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