Performance reporting to citizens is not only seen as an important way to keep governments accountable and transparent, but is also considered as having wider reaching benefits, i.e. increasing trust and engagement of citizens... [ view full abstract ]
Performance reporting to citizens is not only seen as an important way to keep governments accountable and transparent, but is also considered as having wider reaching benefits, i.e. increasing trust and engagement of citizens (Grosso and van Ryzin 2014, James and Petersen 2017). Creating positive perceptions about government performance (van Ryzin and Laverna 2013) however depends on a variety of factors, among them the perceived credibility of the presented performance information, i.e. the extent to which an information recipient or addressee believes that the information truthfully reports performance (James and Petersen 2017). The latter has been addressed in (behavioural) public management researchonly recently, with studies mainly focusing on source credibility (Grosso and Van Ryzin 2011; James 2010, James and Van Ryzin 2017). In this regard, more recent studies show that information about government performance that is published by an independent source is perceived as more credible (e.g. James and Petersen 2017), while prior studies revealed no difference in information credibility between different sources (e.g. van Ryzin and Laverne 2014). Partly referring to these inconsistencies, scholars have started to argue that more research is needed on the antecedents of source credibility as well as on other factors influencing information credibility from the perspective of citizens (James and Petersen 2017). In this paper we therefore aim to contribute to the discussion about (1) (source) credibility and (2) the underlying factors by closely building on previous research in this area (van Ryzin and Laverna 2014, James and Petersen 2017).
In addressing the first aspect we use an experimental design (van Ryzin and Laverna 2014) and explore the impact of different information sources on the perceived credibility of performance information. Keeping all other aspects constant, the study is conducted as a single-factor experiment in which participants (n=626) are randomized into one of four treatment groups. The data for the study comes from an online panel survey in Germany. The experiment was conducted in July 2017. Each group received the same information on the performance of a specific local government service as well as on the communication channel, while the information about the source differed (i.e. mayor’s office, independent non-profit organization, local government department, or citizen initiative). The (preliminary) results show that the source of performance reports influence citizens’ view on the performance information credibility, with the independent non-profit organization receiving the highest, and the mayor’s office receiving the lowest scores. In a second step, we investigate the explanatory power of different factors (competence and honesty of source, attitude toward communication channel, perceived performance) with regard to the credibility of performance information within and across the four different scenarios (2). While source honesty increases citizen perception of performance information credibility in all scenarios, the results substantially vary for the other factors (trust, source competence, attitude toward communication channel, perceived performance). The study offers not only new insights with regard to the importance of different factors driving credibility, but also supports the call for dealing with the credibility of information sources in a more differentiated way.
