2005 Leonard D. White Award

For the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted in 2003 or 2004 in the field of public administration.

Award Committee: Jeff Worsham, West Virginia University, chair; Laura A. Reese, Wayne State University; and Christine Thurlow Brenner, Rutgers University.

Recipient: Sergio Fernandez, University of Georgia

Dissertation: "Explaining Contracting Effectiveness: An Empirical Analyses of Contracting for Services Among Local Governments."

Dissertation Chair: Hal G. Rainey, University of Georgia

Citation: The Award Committee is happy to recognize Sergio Fernandez as winner of the Leonard D. White Dissertation Award.  The dissertation is an ambitious and imaginative effort to determine the conditions necessary for effective contracting of government services.

Fernandez finds that the perception of local government officials regarding the effectiveness of contracting depends not on the usual suspects-contract specificity, competition, monitoring, and a system of sanctions-but on the degree of trust, among other things, established between government players and contracting agents. As such, the dissertation adds another important piece of evidence to those who challenge standard principal-agent accounts, while it expands our understanding of an important puzzle of public administration.

The dissertation creates an eight-item questionnaire scale on which government officials are asked to rate the effectiveness of a contract on which they focused. In including contracts for 67 different types of services and surveying 457 officials in various sized municipalities throughout the United States, Professor Fernandez has created a reliable and inventive means of getting at municipal officials assessment of contracting effectiveness.

In addition to the contributions of the survey, Professor Fernandez employs a relatively new statistical technique-substantively weighted analytical technique (SWAT)-to analyze his survey results. The use of SWAT allows him to determine which techniques work best among the high performing cases in his sample and to identify the practices that could be employed by municipal officials to increase the likelihood of their satisfaction with contracting. In the end, Professor Fernandez has produced a dissertation that will not only be of interest to students of public administration and bureaucracy, but has real world lessons for public managers.