What Do Administrators Think Citizens Think? Administrator Predictions as an Adjunct to Citizen Surveys

Abstract

Public administrators, especially in local government, work every day to serve the citizenry, presumably acting in part on the basis of what they think citizens want of them as administrators. How those administrators feel about their jobs and maybe even about themselves may depend in part on how they think their work is evaluated by citizens. Yet, surprisingly little is known about what administrators think that citizens think and how accurate administrators are in those perceptions. This article examines this question, using data from municipal officials and a sample of residents from the City of Atlanta, Georgia. The uniqueness of the data lies in how they permit comparisons between citizen perceptions about municipal services and the predictions of top municipal administrators about those perceptions. These data permit us to assess the meaning and value of administrator predictions as a supplementary tool for citizen surveys. The article follows this sequence. First, we consider why administrators' predictions of citizen perceptions may be important, and to the extent possible, place these considerations in the context of prior research and theory. Second, we present the actual citizen-administrator comparisons and attempt to explain the consistencies and discrepancies between the two. Finally, we conclude by suggesting the value of obtaining administrative predictions as a part of future citizen surveys. Why Care Whether Administrators Can Predict? Gathering data on citizen ratings of government services is not new. These data have been collected by municipal administrators for several decades to assist in pinpointing problems in service delivery. What is new in the current research is the effort to compare citizen perceptions of city services to administrator predictions of those citizen perceptions. One might wonder why we should care how well administrators can predict citizen perceptions. Certainly, few scholars appear to have cared before now. To be sure, connections between citizens and administrators have received extensive attention in the public administration literature (e.g., Cupps, 1977; Luton, 1993; Stivers, 1990; Thomas, 1995), and administrator perceptions of citizen opinions have sometimes been of interest (e.g., Berman, 1997). However, with one limited exception (Sabatier, Hunter, and McLaughlin, 1987), we could find no research that compared administrator perceptions to citizen perceptions, much less research focusing on the even narrower question of how well administrators can predict what citizens perceive. There is a rich body of research in political science on a similar issue: the correspondence between the opinions and voting behavior of elected officials and the policy preferences of their constituents. Beginning more than 40 years ago (e.g., Dexter, 1956), political scientists have examined how citizens, as constituents, influence--or do not influence--the choices of their elected representatives (for a recent summary of this literature, see Arnold, 1990). Researchers have found, for example, that constituency influence can depend on such factors as how accurately representatives perceive the attitudes of their constituents (Miller and Stokes, 1966) and whether representatives view their roles more as delegates, elected to represent citizens, or as trustees, elected to decide on the basis of their best judgment (Wahlke et al., 1962). The same kind of interest should hold for public administrators and the citizens they represent. Most students of public administration now accept that administrators frequently make value judgments, rather than simply applying neutral competence as was once thought to be the case. As such, administrators may often be acting as what Cooper (1984) termed citizen-administrators, that is, as citizens who work as administrators but on behalf of other citizens. In that capacity and in an era of increased public involvement in public management (see Thomas, 1995), administrators presumably attempt to make decisions at least partially on the basis of what they believe citizens perceive and want. …