New Public Management and Citizens' Perceptions of Local Service Efficiency, Responsiveness, Equity and Effectiveness

Abstract

We examine the relationship between a range of new public management (NPM) practices and citizens' perceptions of service efficiency, responsiveness, equity and effectiveness in English local governments. We find that public–private relationships have a negative relationship with citizens' perceptions of all four dimensions of local service performance, but an entrepreneurial strategic orientation exhibits a positive association with all four. Performance management is also likely to positively influence rather than negatively influencing citizens' perceptions of local public services. Further analysis revealed that the impact of NPM practices varies according to the level of socio-economic disadvantage confronted by local governments.

Key words:

• New public management
• efficiency
• responsiveness
• equity
• effectiveness

Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 266887 (Project COCOPS), Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities.

Notes

We also explored the potential effects of local government structure further by including a dummy variable coded 1 for the two large county councils subject to disaggregation in the English local government restructuring that occurred in 2008 and 0 for all other councils in the statistical models. Inclusion of this measure did not add anything to the explanatory power of the model or alter the direction or statistical significance of the other variables so it was excluded from the models we present in table 2.

Before running the models, skewness tests were carried out to establish whether each independent variable was distributed normally. High-skew test results for population (1.85) and population density (1.76) indicated non-normal distributions. To correct for positive skew, logged versions of these variables were created.