Benchmarking, municipalities with extended powers, performance, public administration, quality
Paper deals with the application of benchmarking in the practice of the selected type of public administration institutions in the Czech Republic – authorities of municipalities with extended powers. Benchmarking belongs to methods of increasing quality of public administration which are applied in terms of public administration institutions in the Czech Republic since the year 2000, particularly in conditions of territorial self-government authorities. Aim of the paper is to describe and evaluate benefits of benchmarking for improving the performance and quality of authorities of municipalities with extended powers. In the first part of the paper, there are defined basic theoretical postulates in the view of types, application and possibilities of benchmarking, both in general and also in terms of public administration. Following parts of the paper are focused on the evaluation of questionnaire survey conducted in 2010 among the active authorities of municipalities with extended powers in the area of benchmarking, mainly through the means of correlation analysis.