Assessing public services from the citizen perspective: what can we learn from surveys?

ABSTRACT

Surveys have become an established means by which scholars can evaluate and assess the quality of public services provided by governments. Though surveys must be interpreted with caution, as explained here, they also have the advantage of providing useful insights about public services that cannot easily be gauged from other assessment techniques. After briefly expounding on the use of surveys, we go on to present the papers included in this special issue and the main insights they bring onto questions of assessing public services from the citizen perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Public services
• citizens
• consumers
• surveys

Acknowledgements

Judith Clifton and Marcos Fernández Gutiérrez acknowledge research support under the Erasmus + Jean Monnet Chair on European Economic Policy for Business and Civil Society, 586909 EPP 1 2017 ES EPPJMO CHAIR 2O17–20. Judith Clifton also acknowledges support by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924563).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.