Contingent Professionalism of Third-Party Professionals in Public Service Delivery

Abstract

Procuring the services of third-party professionals via government contracting is vital to high-quality public service delivery. Yet, third-party professionals may compromise their professionalism and do not offer a desired level of quality service to the public when they depend on the powerful client—the state—for business and resources. This study tests and expands this powerful-client-driven explanation by focusing on the quality of service given by private lawyers to citizens through a government-initiated online public legal assistance program. We compiled a novel dataset containing 2,228 legal counseling cases with both citizens’ inquiries and lawyers’ responses taken from the public legal service e-platform of Guangdong, China, in 2016. We found that although law firms’ dependence on the state (indicated by seats held in legislative and consultative institutions) sways the quality of legal information provided by individual lawyers to citizens, such negative effect disappears when the lawyer is female or highly educated, or when citizens perceive the lawyer as a legal expert and explicitly address him or her as such. Together, our findings underscore the importance of understanding interdependence among multiple actors in shaping third-party professionalism in dual-client settings and raise important implications for professionals engaged in public service delivery.