Exploring public participation modes in government: The case of infrastructure policies

ABSTRACT

In this study, we compare three modes of public participation in government (policy endorsement, coproduction, and co-investment) and introduce a two-layer explanation to the variations in citizens’ willingness to participate in these modes. We present effort as an overarching factor so more demanding modes receive lower public support. We also argue that issue importance, trust in government, and political ideology shape individuals’ degree of participation. Using data from a public opinion survey on local infrastructure, we demonstrate the overarching role of effort and the direct effects of all three factors on the different levels of public participation in government policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Coproduction
• co-investment
• public participation
• infrastructure policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2023.2196550.

Notes

1. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/National_IRC_2021-report.pdf; https://www.dw.com/en/german-infrastructure-begging-for-overhaul/a-57250602; https://csisprosper.com/2019/03/19/roads-to-prosperity-fixing-argentinas-crooked-infrastructure/.

2. Participation in this paper relates to multiple forms beyond the basic acts of voting. See the discussion below about different types of citizens’ engagement with government.

3. Alonso et al. (2019) also measure willingness to donate money or to buy eco-friendly products. Yet, their model does not distinguish this action from the more common coproduction activities.

4. Ipsos Public Affairs (Ipsos) conducted this Texas public opinion survey of adults 18 years and older. The survey was in the field April 26 – May 6, 2021. The sample was drawn from Ipsos’ web-enabled KnowlegePanel®, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The median survey completion time was 15.65 minutes. The completion rate of 51% yielded 610 completed surveys. Ethics approval for the survey at Texas A&M University (ID: IRB2021–0117 M).

5. We recode responses 1–3 as no support (value of 0), and responses 4–5 as support (value of 1).

6. The item describes two types of facilities – power plant or flood prevention system. Our analysis does not find differences between both types so we collapse them into a single category.

7. The item describes three level of payment: $5, $10, $15. Since our analysis does not find effect for these differences, we collapse the responses. As in the coproduction item, there is also variation in the type of facility. Our analysis finds no effect for the facility type so we collapse both categories into one.

8. To conserve space, we only include two policy options (endorsement mode) in Table 1. We chose options that represent the highest and lowest ‘bounds’ of respondents’ support as seen in Figure 1. Regression models of all four policy options are available in the online appendix.

9. Both values are the mean predicted probabilities of the three levels of liberals and conservatives.

10. We ask about the importance of 13 policy issues including government spending, climate, healthcare, etc. On average, infrastructure ranked 9th out of those 13 policy areas. For more information, see the online appendix.

11. See other studies on coproduction (Hattke and Kalucza 2019) and coinvestment (Zhang, Liu, and Vedlitz 2020a).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation [RAPID project(#1760258); CRISP project (#1832662)]