Proposed non-linear relation between satisfaction with government performance and co-production: an initial empirical test

ABSTRACT

This study attempted to estimate a new descriptive model that integrated the elements of the expectancy-disconfirmation model and the prospect theory framework and examined the linear and non-linear relations between citizen satisfaction with public services and co-production. Based on the 2014 data on U.S. citizens, the results proposed that citizens who are not dissatisfied were more likely to participate in its co-production. This study found that citizen satisfaction shows quadratic patterns of increases with decreasing rates of participation in co-production. The limitation of the data and models used in this study were further discussed for cautious interpretations of the results.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-production
• citizen satisfaction
• government performance
• expectancy-disconfirmation model
• prospect theory

Acknowledgments

I thank Dr. Nicolai Petrovsky for guiding and supporting my work and the reviewers for their interests and comments to improve this paper. Also, I thank Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and its major supporters (the United States Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Vanderbilt University) for making the data available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Parrado et al. (2013) and Bovaird et al. (2015) studied co-production at the individual level in European countries. However, it is important to know the way U.S. citizens co-produce at the individual level, as the administrative culture and political system are different from those in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

2. Although there were 753 total observations in the dataset, 136 were omitted either because their children did not attend school, they did not use health services, or both, in the past 12 months at the time they took this survey. There were an additional 69 missing values for the main and control variables.

3. Through attendance, individuals can prioritize policies and public services (co-commissioning), discuss improvement in public services (co-design) based on their experiences and evaluations (co-assessment), and learn how to use the services (co-delivery) appropriately.

4. Respondents were asked the following questions: ‘In general, would you say that you are very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with’: 1) the way democracy works in the United States?; 2) the performance of the police in your neighbourhood?; 3) the condition of the streets, roads, and highways?; 4) the quality of public schools?, and 5) the quality of public medical and health services? Cronbach’s alpha for these indicators was 0.713. Satisfaction with the U.S. democratic system was included because it is related closely to citizen co-production. Co-production is considered one type of democratic participation through which citizens influence government decisions and performance (Pestoff 2009). In this study, satisfaction with the U.S. democratic system was considered a citizen’s evaluation of the ‘performance of a democratic regime’ (Linde and Ekman 2003). Furthermore, including satisfaction with the U.S. democratic system increased the Cronbach’s alpha from 0.698 to 0.713.

5. This study used the value of 12.5, which is the median value of the indexed satisfaction variable, as the neutral base to designate those dissatisfied and others. Thus, those whose satisfaction value was less than 12.5 were classified as dissatisfied, while those above that value were satisfied.

6. Questions used to measure government trust stated: “To what extent 1) do you think that citizens’ basic rights are well protected by the political system of the US?; 2) do you respect the political institutions of the US?; 3) Do you feel proud of living under the political system of the U.S.?; 4) do you think that one should support the political system of the US?; 5) do you trust political parties?, and 6) do you trust the President? The Cronbach’s alpha of these indicators was 0.87.

7. Mean values of some major control variables were as follows: 47.2 years of age and 2.85 people per household. With respect to proportional frequency, 56% of the sample were females, 50% had a college education, 57% were employed, and 37% were Democrats.

8. The descriptive statistics for the control variables are available upon request.

9. A frequency distribution showed that 321 persons (58.58%) never participated in a meeting, while 227 persons (41.42%) attended at least one meeting or more.

10. The highest predicted probability of co-production was calculated as follows: the negativity of the linear coefficient was divided by twice the quadratic coefficient, approximately 0.1801/0.0110, with a standard error 2.88. Its confidence interval was estimated with the Delta method (Meeker and Escobar 1998).

11. Harman’s one factor test must be used with care, because apparently, it does not produce consistent outcomes in detecting the CMB problem (Fuller et al. 2016).

12. ‘..although method bias can inflate (or deflate) bivariate linear relationships, it cannot inflate (but does deflate) quadratic and interaction effects. Consequently, if a study is designed to test hypotheses about quadratic or interaction effects, rather than main effects, then method bias would not be able to account for any statistically significant effects observed’ (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, and Podsakoff 2012, pp. 564–565).

13. To test whether the relationship between co-production and satisfaction were endogenous, this study conducted two-stage-least-square using individuals’ expectations of police officers’ performance (i.e. Suppose someone enters your home to burglarize it and you call the police. How long do you think it would take the police to arrive at your house on a typical day around noon?) because expectations would determine satisfaction according to EDM. However, the results failed to reject the null hypothesis that the relationship between satisfaction and co-production were endogenous. In addition, expectations also seemed to have a close relationship with co-production (Chathoth et al. 2013) meaning that expectations of police officers’ performance might not function as a robust instrumental variable for this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jue Young Mok

Jue Young Mok, Ph.D., MA, & MPP, is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests are behavioural public administration and management, citizen satisfaction, citizen co-production, and citizen-government interactions.