Donald Moynihan

Moynihan completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in public administration at the University of Limerick (1997) and his master's (1998) and Ph.D. (2002) in public administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.[1]

Upon completing his formal education, Moynihan became an assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University from 2003 until 2005.[2] While there, he received the 2004 Paul Volcker Endowment Junior Scholar Research Grant from the American Political Science Association's Public Administration Section for his work "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Performance? A Content Analysis of Legislative Discussion of Performance Information."[3] Following this, he accepted a similar position at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs within the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[2]

During his early years at UW–Madison, Moynihan published various books including The Dynamics of Performance Management: Constructing Information and Reform, which won the Best Book Award from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management.[4] It also received the Herbert Simon award from the American Political Science Association, which honors the book with the most significant influence in public administration scholarship in the last three to five years.[5] In the same year, Moynihan launched the Performance Information Project "to bring together contemporary empirical research on how public services use performance data."[6] He was also one of four faculty members chosen to establish a partnership between the Department of Political Science and the Elections Division of the state's Government Accountability Board.[7] As a result of his academic achievements, Moynihan was one of the youngest members elected to be a Fellow of the United States National Academy of Public Administration[6] and served as a member of the Policy Council of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.[8] He also served as President of the Public Management Research Association from 2015-2017.

By 2014, Moynihan's work was recognized as being among the most influential to be published by the journal Public Administration Review. His works were The Role of Organizations in Fostering Public Service Motivation and Pulling the Levers: Transformational Leadership, Public Service Motivation, and Mission Valence.[9] He was later appointed the La Follette School's Jerry and Mary Cotter Faculty Fellow[10] and received the David N. Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.[11]

Prior to the 2016 United States presidential election, Moynihan co-authored a paper titled Election Laws, Mobilization, and Turnout: The Unintended Consequences of Electoral Reform, which focused on the effects of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The paper won the State Politics and Policy Best Journal Article Award from the American Political Science Association.[12] In 2022, Moynihan was awarded the Herbert Simon award for the scientific study of bureaucracy from the Midwest Political Science Association. One area of his research has examined the politicization of public services. For example, he detailed the competing motivations behind the creation of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Later work documented attacks on the career civil service during the Trump administration.

His research on federal agencies’ use of performance management data was referenced in President Barack Obama's proposed U.S. budget for 2016 and 2017, and President Biden's 2023 budget proposal. After presenting his research on public sector performance to policymakers at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), he received the Leon D. Epstein Distinguished Faculty Research Award from the University of Wisconsin–Madison's College of Letters & Science.[13] Moynihan's work on performance management argued for studying how public employees actually used performance data to make decisions, reflecting a mroe behavioral approach to the study of public sector reform. Such work would extend to understand the cognitive biases policymakers showed in how they evaluated performance data. This included identifying the role of negativity bias, where policymakers directed more attention in performance data showing low rather than high performance. His paper on this topic "How Do Politicians Attribute Bureaucratic Responsibility for Performance? Negativity Bias and Interest Group Advocacy" won a best paper award from the Academy of Management. He also examined the role of motivated reasoning in policymaker judgement of performance data, showing how it made them more vulnerable to error in, for example, the article "Motivated reasoning and policy information: politicians are more resistant to debiasing interventions than the general public." Moynihan has published two additional books on performance management. One provides a series of case studies about reform efforts across the world. Toward Next-Generation Performance Budgeting : Lessons from the Experiences of Seven Reforming Countries was published by the World Bank in 2016. Behavioral Public Performance was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

His research with Pamela Herd on administrative burden drew attention to the frictions that people encounter with government. As part of efforts to reduce administrative burden, the Biden administration drew on their research in guidance to federal agencies and a 2021 executive order on customer experience. Their research argued that everyday encounters with government were more important than often understood, limiting access to public services and rights, and often serving as a source of inequality. Since publishing their book, Herd and Moynihan have examined a variety of topics. These include the relationship between human capital and burdens (in the paper "Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions"); why people support administrative burdens ("How Difficult Should it Be? Evidence of Burden Tolerance from a Nationally Representative Sample"); the relationship between burdens and race ("Racialized Burdens: Applying Racialized Organization Theory to the Administrative State") and ways in which to use technology to reduce burdens (for example, in the paper "Matching to Categories: Learning and Compliance Costs in Administrative Processes").

Moynihan eventually left UW–Madison in 2018 to join the faculty of Georgetown University with his wife Pamela Herd as the inaugural McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy.[14] From 2018 until 2021, Moynihan was a Visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government and an academic visitor at Nuffield College, Oxford.[15] He is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.

• Donald Moynihan publications indexed by Google Scholar