Suchergebnisse

Prior expectations are an important determining factor of how citizens evaluate politicians, government and public services. Typically, citizen expectations are divided into two main categories: predictive ("will") expectations and normative ("should") expectations. Theories of expectations say that predictive expectations are the sterile and indifferent prediction of future events, while normative expectations have a foundation in personal norms and values and express how the world should look according to the individual. Therefore, normative expectations should have antecedents more closely related to the individual's personality than predictive expectations. However, these theoretical claims regarding the nature of the two different expectation types have not yet been tested empirically. Examining broad personality traits (Big Five) and The Maximizing Tendency trait, this exploratory study analyzes whether different personality antecedents explain the two types of expectations. Results show that the personality traits agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness correlate positively, and extraversion negatively, with normative expectations. None of the traits correlate with predictive expectations. These results have implications for politicians' efforts to shape citizens' expectations, the citizen satisfaction literature, including work considering the expectation-disconfirmation model, and for further research on citizen expectations.

Citizens' expectations are a primary source of information for politicians and public managers when developing public policies in democracies. Moreover, expectations are thought to have extensive influence on how citizens evaluate the resulting policy. If politicians want citizens who are satisfied with public services, they need to address these expectations. Theories of expectation formation tell us that two general forms of expectations exist: predictive and normative. Predictive expectations are about how a future service will be, whereas normative expectations concern how it should be. But do citizens make this distinction? If they perceive and express their expectations differently than the theory predicts, it might affect the knowledge that we have on citizen expectations and their effects. This study investigates whether citizens have different interpretations of expectations and whether making them aware of the distinctions between predictive and normative expectations causes them to change their expectations. Results show that citizens interpret expectations very differently and that experimentally posing different questions about expectations at the same time merely increases the effect. The implications for the assessment of citizen expectations are discussed.

Satisfaction surveys are increasingly used to inform citizens and decision makers about the quality of public services. This use of satisfaction surveys demands a close relationship between citizens' satisfaction and the actual quality of the service. Research is mixed on this point, which may have large implications for the use of citizen satisfaction surveys. In this study, I investigate two aspects of the relationship between quality and satisfaction: Does an objective measure of service quality and the citizens' expectations to the public service affect the citizens' satisfaction levels? This question is investigated using satisfaction data from schools in the City of Aarhus from 2011 and 2013 as well as data from the national tests. The results show that both the objective measure of quality and citizens' expectations affect satisfaction with Danish schools.

Tilfredshedsundersøgelser bliver i stigende grad anvendt til at informere borgere og beslutningstagere om kvaliteten af den offentlige service. Men denne brug af tilfredshedsundersøgelser kræver, at der er en tæt sammenhæng mellem borgernes tilfredshed og den faktiske kvalitet af servicen. Og her viser forskningen ret blandede resultater, hvilket kan have store implikationer for brugen af undersøgelserne. Jeg vil i denne artikel se på to aspekter af sammenhængen mellem kvaliteten og tilfredsheden: Har henholdsvis et objektivt mål for kvalitet og borgernes forventninger til den offentlige service betydning for borgernes tilfredshedsvurdering? Dette spørgsmål undersøges ved hjælp af tilfredshedsdata fra Aarhus Kommunes skoler fra 2011 og 2013 samt de nationale test. Resultaterne viser, at både objektiv kvalitet og borgernes forventninger påvirker tilfredsheden med danske skoler.

Expectations are thought to affect how citizens form their attitudes and behavior toward public services. Such attitudes may include citizen satisfaction, where expectations play a fundamental role, and relevant behaviors include choice of services and the decision to voice opinions about them. However, there are few investigations into what drives citizen expectations and even fewer that consider these relationships across time. This article tests whether prior expectations, perceived performance, and citizen satisfaction influence future expectations, using a unique dataset that follows individual citizens across two subsequent school satisfaction surveys from 2011 and 2013. The results show that prior expectations have a large and consistent influence on future expectations, as predicted by the literature, whereas the influence from prior perceived performance seems less consistent. Prior satisfaction may also influence future expectations, although the effect is minor. The results indicate that citizens' expectations are rather stable across time and may contain normative values and beliefs about how public services should perform.

Citizen satisfaction surveys are used extensively throughout the public sector to assess the performance of public services and to inform decision‐makers. Recent research points to cognitive biases that may occur in citizens' perceptions of performance of public services, but we know little about possible biases in the collection of these data. This shortcoming is addressed by investigating the priming and context effects that can arise from the structure of citizen surveys—for example, from the question order in the survey. Two independent experimental studies find that prior positively framed questions about police services affect subsequent satisfaction evaluations of other local public services. However, an informational prime about crime and unrelated questions about family‐life satisfaction have little effect on the subsequent satisfaction evaluations. The results show that citizen evaluations of public services can be influenced by irrelevant context effects, but this may depend on the topics of prior questions.

AbstractUnderstanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Second-order preferences such as gender and race are mostly necessary when there is a tie in first-order preferences when voters choose between two same-party candidates or have no party information. We show how conjoint experiments can be used to test for lexicographic preferences and use data from a US-representative sample and a pre-registered replication to confirm that in the United States, gender and race are second-order preferences. Lexicographic preferences provide a theoretical lens explaining some of the mixed results of gender and race in the candidate literature.

AbstractSome of the most important decisions young people make are choices about education. Yet recent research shows that educational decisions are poorly explained by classical models of human capital investments: adolescents do not always choose what would best optimize their long-term net outcomes. Instead, students have been shown to be influenced by their current group of peers at the time when they make educational decisions. We expand on existing models by showing that students' stated educational preferences can be influenced by simply priming them with their peers' preferences. Further, we show that students are unaware of this peer influence in the sense that: (1) they claim that peers have no influence; (2) in a conjoint experiment, they do not select educations based on peers' assessments; and (3) in a list experiment absent of any social desirability bias, they do not ascribe any influence to their peers either. All in all, the results show that young people are unwittingly influenced by their peers. These results have important implications for public policies aimed at encouraging young people to make more deliberate and informed educational choices.

AbstractNot all citizens' voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them "coproducers") increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the education policy through government citizen surveys and their tendency to vote in elections. Among these normally underrepresented citizens, coproduction increased their propensity to voice their preferences to politicians through citizen surveys but not their tendency to vote. The effect on voicing in government citizen surveys tends to be larger among nonvoters. The results indicate how policies involving underrepresented citizens can raise the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard.

Not all citizens' voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them "coproducers") increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the education policy through government citizen surveys and their tendency to vote in elections. Among these normally underrepresented citizens, coproduction increased their propensity to voice their preferences to politicians through citizen surveys but not their tendency to vote. The effect on voicing in government citizen surveys tends to be larger among nonvoters. The results indicate how policies involving underrepresented citizens can raise the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard. ; Not all citizens' voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them "coproducers") increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the education policy through government citizen surveys and their tendency to vote in elections. Among these normally underrepresented citizens, coproduction increased their propensity to voice their preferences to politicians through citizen surveys but not their tendency to vote. The effect on voicing in government citizen surveys tends to be larger among nonvoters. The results indicate how policies involving underrepresented citizens can raise the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard.

Borgeres til- og fravalg i velfærdsstaten har store konsekvenser for kvaliteten og indretningen af den offentlige service. Derfor er det også vigtigt for politikere og beslutningstagere at vide, hvilke faktorer der har indflydelse på borgernes til- og fravalg, og hvordan borgerne afvejer dem mod hinanden. Vi undersøger disse spørgsmål i en repræsentativ spørgeskemaundersøgelse, hvor vi beder respondenterne tage stilling til daginstitutionsvalg i et conjoint eksperiment. Resultaterne viser, at de inkluderede faktorer alle har meningsfulde effekter på sandsynligheden for valget af en daginstitution. Dog ser information om, hvorvidt daginstitutionen er offentlig eller privat/selvejende, ikke ud til at have nogen indflydelse. Desuden ser vi på, om en højere andel af uddannede pædagoger kan dæmpe den negative effekt af lave normeringer – det viser sig ikke at være tilfældet.

In modern welfare states, citizens' choice of service providers is consequential for both service quality and the design of public services. Politicians and other central decision makers have a substantial interest in understanding how different factors affect citizens' choice of service and how citizens make trade-offs between these factors. Using a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of Danish citizens, we study the importance of different organizational factors in the choice of daycare provider. Our results show that all included factors have meaningful effects on the propensity to choose a given provider. However, information about public vs. private ownership does not seem to have an impact on service choice. Additionally, we study whether having a high proportion of staff with pedagogical education can offset the negative impact of a poor staff to child ratio – this turns out not to be the case.