The way in which citizens interpret performance information is an important factor that shapes perceptions of public sector performance (James, 2011). In recent years, research on negativity bias and public performance information in public administration has received increased attention (James, 2010; James and Mosely 2014, Olsen 2015a, 2015b; Baekgaard 2015). These studies show that negative performance information decreases citizens’ assessment of public service performance while positive performance information has a smaller effect or even no effect. Besides the general negativity bias in performance information, an additional explanation for these findings may be related to the publicness of the organizations. Because public organizations are often associated with inefficiency, inflexibility, and other pejoratives, citizens are likely to perceive the organizational performance of public organizations more negatively than the performance of private organizations (Marvel, 2015; Hvidman and Andersen, 2016). The bias against public sector performance might explain the limited effect of positive performance information.
In the present study, we aim to disentangle the perceived performance effects of negativity bias and publicness. Our central research question is: To what extent do ‘publicness’ of services and performance information affect citizens’ perceptions of the performance of services?
The central hypothesis is that negative performance information will affect perceived performance in a more negative way for public service providers than for their private counterparts. An important reason for this is that negative performance information may confirm citizens’ preconceived ideas (i.e., stereotypes) or implicit negative attitudes towards public organizations. This tendency to interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs is commonly referred to as “confirmation bias.” When confronted with negative performance information on public organizations, citizens’ preconceived ideas are confirmed and citizens’ perceptions of public service delivery are lowered even further.
How citizens perceive performance might also be contingent on the type of service. Most of the existing research, however, is focused on a single type of service delivery such as health or safety. In order to test the validity of our theoretical model, we distinguish between four types of services: health care, public safety, mass transit, and waste collection.
We conduct four randomized survey-experiments and use a 3 x 2 factorial design to isolate the direct effects of negative and positive performance information and test the interactions between performance information and publicness. The respondents are presented with descriptions of a fictitious organization that vary in terms of performance information (positive/negative/undisclosed) and publicness (public/private) and are asked to rate the performance of the organization. Empirically, we measure four dimensions of perceived performance: effectiveness, efficiency, responsiveness, and equity. In order to reduce the possibility of confounding factors, we control for individual characteristics such as gender, age, political ideology, sector preference, public service motivation, and bureaucratic tolerance.
Van_den_Bekerom_Van_der_Voet_Christensen_2018.pdf 