Abstract
Citizen satisfaction is a popular means of performance management. It underscores a common conception that citizens are customers who are concerned about the quality of public goods and services. We offer a theory that suggests the quantity of public goods and services is also important. We develop our theory based on democratic models of the public where citizens are concerned about equity and accessibility to public goods and services. Using data from two municipal surveys and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), we test three hypotheses and find that both quality and quantity of public service provision are significant antecedents to citizen satisfaction. In our conclusion, we explain how these results call for a more complex conceptualization of the performance associated with managing for citizen satisfaction, and we recommend public managers develop and employ skills that recognize the complex consumptive and democratic attributes of citizens in a public economy.
Highlights
At the local level of government, professional public managers and elected officials face strong pressures to satisfy citizens
These questions are important for local public managers because, traditionally, these managers have considered better service quality to be a critical component of improving citizen satisfaction
Using data from two municipal surveys and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), we test three hypotheses and we find that both quality and quantity are important to citizens because they affect citizen satisfaction
Summary
At the local level of government, professional public managers and elected officials face strong pressures to satisfy citizens. We ask whether the quality of government service provision is the only evaluative criterion that matters for satisfied citizens or whether the quantity of government goods and services offered affects citizen satisfaction These questions apply to public managers at all levels of government (Morgeson, 2014), these issues are most relevant for municipal governments (especially in the context of council—manager forms and strong mayors with Chief Administrative Officers [CAOs]). These questions are important for local public managers because, traditionally, these managers have considered better service quality to be a critical component of improving citizen satisfaction. Reminds public managers to pay attention to the quantity of public service provision as well
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