Partisan bias and citizen satisfaction, confidence, and trust in the U.S. Federal Government

ABSTRACT

While the U.S. federal government has adopted myriad initiatives mandating collection of citizen evaluations of its services, scant research exists into how prior biases such as those arising from political partisanship affect these performance metrics. In this study, we examine a multi-year sample asking U.S. citizens about their experiences with federal government services (n = 8,341). Guided by motivated reasoning theory, the results show that partisanship affects citizen satisfaction, confidence, and trust in the federal government during both Democratic (2015–2016) and Republican (2017–2018) presidential administrations. However, the results indicate an asymmetric ‘president-in-power’ effect, complicating efforts to interpret this data dynamically and over time as power changes hands.

KEYWORDS:

• Partisan motivated reasoning
• citizen satisfaction
• confidence
• trust
• public management
• public policy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. See: https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

2. Question wording for the party affiliation survey items were adopted following the approach used by the American National Election Study (ANES). For more information on the ANES: https://electionstudies.org

3. To assess the robustness of our results reported in Tables 2 and 3 below, we estimated alternate models by operationalizing citizen partisanship differently. We recoded Democratic partisans as those identifying themselves as ‘strong Democrat’ or ‘weak Democrat’ and Republican partisans as those identifying themselves as ‘strong Republican or ‘weak Republican’. With this recoding, the non-partisans/independents reference group comprises of those respondents who identified themselves as either ‘independent-leans Democrat’, ‘independents’, or ‘independent-leans Republican’. Using the same specification (equation 1 below) we find that the results from these models are qualitatively similar to the ones reported in Tables 2 and 3, indicating the robustness of our findings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Forrest V. Morgeson III

Forrest V. Morgeson III is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. His research focuses on customer and citizen satisfaction and has been published in the leading journals in both marketing and administration, including: Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, and Government Information Quarterly. Dr. Morgeson’s first book, Citizen Satisfaction: Improving Government Performance, Efficiency, and Citizen Trust, was released in 2014.

Pratyush Nidhi Sharma

Pratyush Nidhi Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the Culverhouse College of Business at the University of Alabama. He received his PhD from University of Pittsburgh in 2013. His interdisciplinary research has been published in highly acclaimed journals such as Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Retailing, Decision Sciences, Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Business Research, Journal of International Marketing, and International Journal of Accounting Information Systems. He has also published several book chapters and presented his research at premier conferences such as the International Conference on Information Systems, American Marketing Association and INFORMS.

Udit Sharma

Udit Sharma is a doctoral student in marketing at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. He holds master’s degree in Marketing Research from Michigan State University. His area of research interest is marketing strategy with emphases on customer-firm relationships, the marketing-finance interface, and marketing in upper echelons.

G. Tomas M. Hult

G. Tomas M. Hult is a worldwide thought leader in international marketing, marketing strategy, customer satisfaction, supply chain management, and international business. He regularly speaks at high-profile events (e.g., United Nations, World Investment Forum, European Commission) and publishes influential op-ed articles (e.g., The Hill, Time, Fortune, World Economic Forum, Dinero). Dr. Hult is a member of the Expert Networks of the World Economic Forum and United Nations/UNCTAD’s World Investment Forum, and is also part of the Expert Team at the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).