The first scientific output from the PRIN by the Politecnico di Milano and Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Giuridiche e Studi Internazionali – Università di Padova on “Administrative capacity: definitions, measurement, policy interventions and economic impacts” is now out in the journal “Governance”: “Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Administrative Capacity With Open Data: Could ‘Administrative Throughput’ Be the Missing Link Between Administrative Inputs and Outputs?” by Ugo Fratesi, Felipe Livert, Laura Polverari and Cristina Zerbinati. It is available in OPEN ACCESS here.

This interdisciplinary paper demostrates that new, and under-exploited, project-level open data can be a useful source for more precise measurement of administrative capacity; that the relationship between administrative input and performance is not as straightforward as is commonly assumed; and that there are some clear factors that might enable some municipalities to perform better than others, a concept the authors have named ‘administrative throughput’. The article also provides a preliminary theoretical framework for the concept of ‘administrative throughput’, offering a more nuanced understanding of administrative capacity and opening new avenues for public administration theory, research, and practice.

The publication and the entire research project were made possible by a number of practitioners and scholars who provided the team with data, feedback and suggestions, and by the members of the study’s scientific board and all those who participated in the project’s interim and closing meetings. The support of all these actors is gratefully acknowledged. The financial contribution from the Ministry of University of Research, in the context of PRIN project “Administrative capacity: definitions, measurement, policy interventions and economic impacts”, MUR code 20225YEWNS_002, within the framework of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2, CUP C53D23004790006, was also fundamental to develop the new research that is presented in the paper.