Citizen Feedback Research Articles

Infrastructure legibility—a comparative analysis of open311-based citizen feedback systems

During the past decade, most large US cities have implemented non-emergency incident reporting systems via telephone helplines, websites and more recently, mobile applications. Using data from systems operating in the larger Boston area, and spatial and grounded theory analysis of submitted reports, this article investigates the role of design in shaping the interaction between the citizens and the city. It investigates the following questions: Which assumptions about the users are embedded in design of existing feedback systems? What motivates users to participate, and how do the systems’ design choices correspond with these motivations? By what mechanisms do these systems facilitate and constrain the interaction between citizen and city?

Online Consultation and Citizen Feedback in Chinese Policymaking

In recent years, the Chinese government has increasingly utilised online consultation as a means of providing citizens with opportunities to offer feedback on draft laws and regulations. As little is known about the operation of online consultation, this article analyses the content of citizen feedback submitted on a revision to China's health system proposed by the National Development and Reform Commission. Citizen engagement with the political and substantive issues under consideration is crucial if online consultation is to impact government decision-making and enhance the performance of laws and regulations. This paper's main findings are that it was common for comments to address substantive issues in great depth, as well as express negative assessments of government decisions. This suggests that online consultation holds promise as an instrument of governance reform, which the Chinese Communist Party has embraced as a means of cultivating popular support.

Culture of Silence: Corruption when Customers' Reports are Strategic Substitutes

A primary means of bureaucratic oversight is consumer complaints. Yet, this important control mechanism has received very little attention in the literature on corruption. I study a model of with incomplete information in which consumers require a government service from officials who may be corrupt. A victim of can report corrupt officials to higher-ranking officials (supervisors) who may be corrupt or honest. I find that social welfare may be non-monotonic in the proportion of honest supervisors. In some cases, an increase in the proportion of honest supervisors increases social welfare only if there is a critical mass of honest supervisors. Under certain conditions, there is, surprisingly, an equilibrium in which no one reports regardless of the proportion of honest supervisors although all lower-ranking officials are corrupt. The analysis shows that using an increase in consumer complaints as a measure of the success of an anti-corruption campaign may be wrong because the consumers may benefit in other ways (e.g., a fall in the equilibrium bribe). I also fill a gap in the literature by endogenizing an official's decision to engage in corruption with theft or corruption without theft as defined by Shleifer and Vishny (1993) and use the model to shed light on recent anti-corruption initiatives such as the Punjab Citizen Feedback Model in Pakistan and a recent proposal by Kaushik Basu (2012).

Consumers' Complaints, the Nature of Corruption, and Social Welfare

A primary means of bureaucratic oversight is consumer complaints. Yet, this important control mechanism has received very little attention in the literature on corruption. I study a model of corruption with incomplete information in which consumers require a government service from officials who may be corrupt. A victim of corruption can report corrupt officials to higher-ranking officials (supervisors) who may be corrupt or honest. I find that social welfare may be non-monotonic in the proportion of honest supervisors. In some cases, an increase in the proportion of honest supervisors increases social welfare only if there is a critical mass of honest supervisors. Under certain conditions, there is, surprisingly, an equilibrium in which no one reports corruption regardless of the proportion of honest supervisors although all lower-ranking officials are corrupt. The analysis shows that using an increase in consumer complaints as a measure of the success of an anti-corruption campaign may be wrong because the consumers may benefit in other ways (e.g., a fall in the equilibrium bribe). I also fill a gap in the literature by endogenizing an official’s decision to engage in “corruption with theft” or “corruption without theft” as defined by Shleifer and Vishny (1993) and use the model to shed light on recent anticorruption initiatives such as the Punjab Citizen Feedback Model in Pakistan and a recent proposal by Kaushik Basu (2012).

Source of Job Satisfaction among South Korean Police Officers

Studies of police job satisfaction show consistent findings that work-related variables have greater effects than personal demographic factors. Despite the cumulative knowledge about the sources of police officers' job satisfaction, there exist several limitations, including the applicability of the findings drawn from Western studies to the Asian context and differences in the determinants of job satisfaction across organisational subgroups. This study contributes to current literature by examining both phenomena: (1) whether work-related factors dominate for South Korean police officers, and (2) whether determinants of job satisfaction vary across type of duty. Using a sample of 341 Korean police officers, this study found that work-related variables indeed had stronger effects than demographic on job satisfaction in the sample. However, the determinants of job satisfaction differ between patrol officers and clerical officers. Although perceptions of pay and commitment have significant effects on job satisfaction for both groups, autonomy, job security and citizen feedback affect only clerical officers' job satisfaction, but not patrol officers'.

Text-mining the voice of the people

Statistical techniques help public leaders turn text in unstructured citizen feedback into responsive e-democracy.

Can user perception influence the quality of water services? Evidence from León, Nicaragua

This article investigates the validity of citizen feedback to evaluate the quality of water services in León, Nicaragua. Using generalized ordered logit models, this study presents a comprehensive evaluation of user satisfaction from water service characteristics. Potential asymmetries in the response of user satisfaction to relative perception of service performance are also investigated. Findings indicate that citizen satisfaction is based on basic service characteristics rather than socio-demographics, and that relativity matters. Users tend to overemphasize their frustration if they perceive that they have lower quality of water services than their peers, and understate their satisfaction if they perceive that they have better services. Points for practitioners Based on the evidence presented in this article, citizen surveys can be used as a tool to improve water services, particularly in places where public service users have no voice and alternatives to cope with low quality services do not exist. However, citizen survey results should be carefully interpreted given that users overemphasize their frustration if they perceive that they have lower quality of services than their peers. Policy design based on citizen surveys should take into account this potential asymmetry in citizen satisfaction, particularly in places with heterogeneous service performance.

Citizen-Centric E-Government Services: Understanding Integrated Citizen Service Information Systems

Advances in the networked features of information and communication technologies hold the promise of enhancing integrated citizen-centric information and services. However, few governments to date have implemented an integrated citizen service information system, which is needed to fulfill that promise. This study aims to investigate the organizational determinants of the level of integration and use of a citizen service information system. It draws from the literatures on diffusion and adoption of innovation, technology acceptance and use, information systems implementation, and information technology (IT) and public administration. The primary sources of data are from International City/County Management Association (ICMA) data on citizen service systems and Electronic government (e-government) surveys. Ordered logit is the primary data analysis technique used. The study findings suggest the importance of getting citizen feedback in the move toward a more integrated citizen service information system. Strong organizational commitment to citizen services further plays a significant role in the more sophisticated use of such a system. Overall, however, management capacity and technical capacity do not register a significant relationship with a more sophisticated and extensively used system.

Embracing New Policies, Technologies, and Community Partnerships: A Case Study of the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control

As the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control embraced new policies, technologies, and rhetorical strategies, they simultaneously moved through Lukensmeyer and Torres's “four levels of public involvement,” which include the information, consultation, engagement, and collaboration levels (Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006). Because of the technical and scientific nature of air quality inspections, increasing public involvement, especially the involvement of those in a predominantly African American and a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, has been a challenge. This article describes the Bureau's journey through the information level, where the Bureau opens public access and participation in the investigation and reporting process; the consultation level, where Bureau staff go door-to-door in poor and minority neighborhoods collecting citizen feedback regarding perceived environmental hazards; the engagement level, where the Bureau conducts monthly environmental meetings with neighborhood residents; and the collaboration level, where citizens are taught to collect evidence of environmental violations.

Citizen Feedback and Delivery of Urban Services

Summary Citizen feedback is considered an effective means for improving the performance of public utilities. But how well does such information reflect the actual quality of service delivery? We investigate this question using data for Bangalore, India. In our framework actual service levels as well as expectations about service performance influence household satisfaction. We find that satisfaction increases with improvements in own service status, but is also influenced by comparisons with service levels of neighbors or peers. This implies that satisfaction is at least in part determined by factors that are unrelated to actual service quality experienced by the household.

Dear Mayor

E-government at the local level in China has emphasized numerous interactive features. One such feature has been the “leader’s mailbox” for citizen communications with the government. In the Yangzi Delta cities of Hangzhou and Nanjing, new reform-oriented mayors have emphasized e-government as an important tool for improving governmental performance; their decisions to publish many of the “mayor’s mailbox” communications online were intended to encourage grass-roots feedback, place pressure on bureaucratic agencies to change their behavior, and build a stronger popular image for local governments. The mailboxes in the two cities are managed differently, and differ in their articulation with other bureaucratic processes. Those differences may in part reflect somewhat different political priorities for the mayors, and may spell differences in the effectiveness and potential for institutionalization of this aspect of e-government. Ultimately, these mailboxes are effective because they work alongside other reforms in urban governance. By eliciting citizen feedback and increasing intragovernmental transparency, the mailboxes have become important information sources for government managers, but they are more likely to be effective in improving bureaucratic-administrative operations than in fostering participatory-democratic developments or progress towards civil society.

Patrol Officer Responses to Citizen Feedback: An Experimental Analysis

Police organizations that implement community policing often seek new ways to measure officer performance. One important way to measure officer and organizational performance is through surveys of citizens. Although many police departments survey citizens, research has generally overlooked the manner in which this information is used and the effects of citizen feedback. This research describes one program that provides citizen feedback to patrol officers in hopes of increasing the quality of service that they provide. Using a randomized design, the authors test the effects of providing citizen feedback to officers on their job performance and attitudes. Results show that citizen feedback does not alter officers’ performance, attitudes toward the communities they serve, and activities that put them in close contact with those communities. The authors discuss potential explanations for finding no effects of the feedback intervention and pose directions for future research.

Deliberative Discourse between Citizens and Administrators

This article examines the potential for discourse between citizens and front-line administrators—those who directly deal with citizens. Critics of technical rational organizations question the ability and willingness of administrators to act on citizen feedback. Therefore, the article explores theoretical arguments about organizational rationality and the effect of the “bureaucratic experience,” resulting from administrator-bureaucracy interaction, on administrator ability and willingness to be responsive to citizens. Data from a survey of 147 front-line administrators are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Citizen surveys: a component of the budgetary process

An annual citizen survey can be a valuable component of the municipal budgeting process for cities that elect to institutionalize the process as a way to translate citizen feedback into budgetary priorities. This article explores uses of citizen surveys in identifying latent needs of the community that may not be detected through public hearings or other citizen participation methods. The authors suggest that properly developed and conducted citizen surveys can provide decision-makers with research data that will lead to more responsive public spending and debt financing decisions. The article concludes with a case study of Auburn, Alabama, a city that has successfully used citizen surveys in its budgeting system for the past seventeen years.

Computer networks and political participation: Santa Monica's teledemocracy project

Abstract New communication technologies have been touted as a way to improve political participation by facilitating the flow of political information and opinion between citizens and their leaders. A project in Santa Monica, California, broke new ground for teledemocracy experiments with Public Electronic Network (PEN), the first government‐sponsored computer network intended as a supplemental channel of communication between a city government and citizens. This paper examines how computer networks in general, and PEN in particular, match the ideals of teledemocracy through a descriptive and historical analysis of Santa Monica's Public Electronic Network. “Populist”; uses of communication technology, such as electronic town halls in which information control remains centralized for the politically powerful and citizen feedback is restricted, are seen as less true to teledemocratic ideals than “pluralist”; uses, in which information control is diffused and citizen involvement is facilitated. This analysis concludes that interactive computer networks are well‐suited for facilitating pluralistic political participation. In addition, PEN's hardware and software design is well‐suited to accomplish teledemocratic goals of early and continuous participation in policy formation and decision‐making processes of local government. Possible extensions of this analysis of PEN are discussed.

Decentralizing City Government

Citizen evaluations of two alternative forms of decentralizing city government- administrative and political-are analyzed from the perspective of the respondents' ethnicity, the socioeconomic composition of their neighborhoods, and their ap praisal of the delivery of essential city services. Data were collected in 1974 from a sample of 1,288 residents in selected Community Planning Districts m New York City. While the literature suggests that blacks are particularly receptive to decentral izing city government, the data reported here show that whites are more likely than blacks to endorse both administrative and political decentralization. The strongest commitment to decentralization comes from residents most dissatisfied with current service delivery and from a small but politically active segment of the public. Citizen feedback can serve as an integral component in the evaluation of service effectiveness and as an important mechanism m the search for alternative social change strategies directed to improving the quality of urban life.

Another View of 'Citizen Feedback' to the Mass Media

LETTER-WRITING has traditionally been an encouraged form of expressing opinion in the United States. The oft-heard advice to write your congressman, the space which magazines devote to correspondence they'receive, and the importance that newspapers lend to their to the editor by placing them next to the editorial page seem to legitimize this form of public communication as an intergral part of the democratic process. It is understandable, then, that many individuals direct letters of complaint and demand for change at organizations which they perceive as responsible to the public and important to their lives (Singer, 1973). Quite a bit of research during the past several decades has been devoted to investigating the kinds of people who send letters to various mass media organizations and to noting the kinds of letters they send.' However, no study could be found that examines such citizen in terms of the responses which it elicits within the organizations that receive it. This is a report on such an examination. Specifically, it is a study of the nature and organizational functions of a radio station's procedure for dealing with letters addressed to the station or its manager. A has been observed with respect to those letters that has two complementary functions for the organization: From the standpoint of internal station operations, the performance program serves to minimize the feedback letters' direct influence upon organizational routines by rejecting in a formularized manner any perceived 1 For an extensive review of past studies, see Williams and Leroy (1974). Current Research This section of POQ is reserved for brief reports of research in progress, discussions of unsolved problems, methodological studies, and public opinion data not extensively analyzed or interpreted. Succinct case histories are welcomed, as well as hypotheses and insights that may be useful to other students of public opinion. Usually, material in this section is shorter, more informal, and more tentative than in preceding pages. Joseph Turow is Assistant Professor of Communication, Purdue University. POQ 41 (1977-78) 534-543

More on Cable Communications

Rolla Edward Park (ed.) The Role of Analysis in Regulatory Decisionmaking: The Case of Cable Television (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath/Lexington Books, 1973—$9.50) Ithiel de Sole Pool (ed.) Talking Back: Citizen Feedback and Cable Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973—$9.95) Richard Adler and Walter S. Baer's Aspen Notebook: Cable and Continuing Education (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1973—$15.00/3.95), which like the first notebook (see 4:11:10)

Is greater citizen participation in planning possible and desirable?

A review of present research suggests that significant alterations in democratic forms of government are possible in coming decades due to new communications technologies. Increasing citizen participation in planning is considered desirable due to the growth of planning in a democratic society, the need to restore a psychological balance between available information and decision making opportunities the need for common forums in a society fractionated by multiple communication channels, and the potential for improving the responsiveness of government to the public at large. The advocates of citizen feedback hold a position distinct from the views of establishment social scientists, technocratic planners and radical community activities.

Science, Government, and Citizen Feedback

This paper is based on the keynote address given at the 36th National Meeting of the Operations Research Society of America in Miami Beach, Florida; the theme of the meeting was “Operations Research in the Development of Emerging Countries.”