Are satisfied citizens willing to participate more? An analysis of citizens’ life satisfaction in the public service domain and public participation

ABSTRACT

Citizen participation is an integral part of democratic governance, but because of the predominance of New Public Management and its consumer-oriented approach, citizens tend to be viewed as self-interested and passive actors whom the government needs to satisfy or purposely encourages to facilitate the policy process. Based on our notion of active citizenship, we demonstrate that citizens inherently have some degree of proactiveness and that proactive citizens can enhance their life satisfaction in the public service domain, which motivates their participation. Using 2017 survey data with 1,916 respondents, we examine whether highly satisfied citizens in the health care service domain are more likely to participate in that domain. The findings reveal that life satisfaction in the health care service domain is positively associated with respondents’ participation in it.

KEYWORDS:

• Proactive citizenship
• life satisfaction in the public service domain
• citizen participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Veenhoven (2000) classified the quality of life using two dichotomies: (1) life chances (opportunities for a good life) vs life results (good life itself) and (2) outer qualities (environmental qualities) vs inner qualities (individual quality). Four quadrants created are 1) livability of environment (top left), 2) life-ability of the person (top right), 3) utility of life (bottom left), and 4) appreciation of life (bottom right) (Veenhoven, 2000).

2. For two variables, life satisfaction in the public service domain and effectiveness of government policy, respondents are allowed to choose ‘do not know (0),’ and approximately 1.27 percent (25 respondents) and 1.99 percent (39 respondents) of respondents selected the ‘do not know’ category respectively.

3. Multicollinearity is often diagnosed with Variance Inflation Factor (VIF), and the widely used threshold is 10. For generalized ordered logit regression, we used a community-contributed command, collin, and tested multicollinearity. The mean VIF is 1.54, and VIF scores for each variable are also far less than 10. In addition, we have conducted Herman’s single factor analysis, and the test result shows that no single factor causes the majority of variance (the first unrotated factor accounts for the highest portion of the total variance, which is 21.02 %).

VIF Scores of All Variables

Table

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924956). This work was supported by a Korea University Grant (K2109321). 

Notes on contributors

Na Yeon Kim

Na Yeon Kim is a lecturer at Kookmin University. Her research interests include comparative social policy, policy implementation and evaluation, and public management.

Hyun Joon Kim

Hyun Joon Kim is a professor in the Department of Public Administration at Korea University. His areas of research interest include collaborative public management, performance management, and public service design.

Sun Hee Kim

Sun Hee Kim is a research professor in the Institute of Governmental Studies at Korea University. Her research focuses on citizen participation, coproduction, and public service design.