Differences between public administrators' and elected officials' perspectives on the role of the citizen in service quality improvement processes

Abstract

Purpose – According to the “New Public Management” paradigm, citizens are viewed as active participants through all the different steps of service planning and provision. Nonetheless, citizens' involvement is still far from being systematically applied within local governments. The purpose of this paper is to give a contribution to this stream of research by investigating whether a part of this resistance could be explained by the differences between public administrators and elected officials' perspectives on the role of the citizens in service quality improvement processes.Design/methodology/approach – A mail survey was conducted among a sample of Italian town municipalities in May and June of 2010. A total of 102 questionnaires were returned (59 from politicians and 43 from public managers), and these questionnaires were then analysed through t‐tests and regressions.Findings – Findings support the existence of a statistically significant difference between public administrators' and elected officials' ...