Does Party Identification influence the Impact of Performance Information? Evidence from a large survey experiment in the field

EasyChair Preprint 1077

Abstract

When governments publish performance information, they often expect to increase citizen satisfaction with public services. Yet, the impact of publishing performance information is uncertain. The cognitive heuristic of motivated reasoning has been demonstrated to affect judgment from performance information. The motivations for motivated reasoning can be manifold. This paper however focuses on party affiliation. Motivated reasoning predicts that supporters of the ruling coalition more strongly follow the lead provided by performance information. The data are collected from a large survey experiment in the field. We administered a survey on the satisfaction with local public services to all addresses in a Belgian municipality. An information leaflet with performance information was randomly added to half of the surveys. We obtained 3850 survey responses (a response rate of 24%). For the analysis, we estimate a Bayesian linear regression with an interaction effect for party identification. In contrast to previous research, we find no effects of the provision of performance information on citizen satisfaction. Party identification has a very small and uncertain effect on citizen satisfaction. In the discussion, we explore some potential explanations for the absence of the effect.

Keyphrases: behavioral public administration, citizen satisfaction, experiment, performance information use, political attitudes

@booklet{EasyChair:1077,
  author    = {Wouter Van Dooren and Sabine Rys},
  title     = {Does Party Identification influence the Impact of Performance Information?  Evidence from a large survey experiment in the field},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1077},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}