Where Do Citizens Place Blame for Service Delivery Failure? A Closer Look at Public-Private Partnerships

Abstract

This study examines citizens’ attribution of blame for a failure of public-private partnerships (PPPs) using a survey experiment with a sample of more than 1500 Americans. We find that when service delivery fails, citizens tend to attribute less blame to public actors if the service is delivered by a PPP rather than solely by the government. Additionally, introducing citizen participation in service delivery design reduces the blame assigned to the government in direct service provision, but this effect does not extend to services provided via PPPs. These findings deepen our understanding of how emerging service delivery models affect citizens’ attitudes toward the government.

Keywords:

• Citizen blame
• public service delivery
• public-private partnership
• service failure
• citizen participation

Notes

1 For a variety of PPP structures, see World Bank (2014).

2 The research design of this study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Singapore Management University (IRB-21-081-A070(521)) and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (IRB-2021-987).

3 To respondents assigned to PPP conditions, we ask which party in the PPP is primarily responsible for the project failure. This variable is coded as follows: 1 = the city government, 2 = the private company, 3 = both of the above, and 4 = do not know. We conducted chi-squared tests across service areas and found that there is no statistically significant relationship between citizen participation and the entity judged to be primarily responsible (chi-squared with three degrees of freedom = 1.89, p = 0.60 for social service; 5.40 and 0.14 for economic development).

4 The other interactions (PPPs/citizen participation with social service) do not have significant effects at the 0.05 level.

5 We administered the government trust measure at the end of the survey, which means that our experimental manipulation might have influenced responses to the trust measure, limiting its use as a moderator in the analysis. We appreciate the anonymous reviewer for highlighting this limitation.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE), Tier 1 Grant RG 117/20.

Notes on contributors

Seulki Lee

Seulki Lee, is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Lee Kong Chian Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. Her research focuses on accountability challenges in collaborative governance, citizen participation in policy-making and implementation processes, and representation issues in public management. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, and The American Review of Public Administration.

Soojin Kim

Soojin Kim, is an Assistant Professor of the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include public budgeting and financial management, contracting out, public–private partnerships, citizen satisfaction, and institutional arrangements in policy choices. Her work has been published in The American Review of Public Administration, Public Management Review, Public Performance & Management Review, International Review of Administrative Sciences, and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management. Her recent coauthored book is Exploring Public-Private Partnerships in Singapore: The Success-Failure Continuum (Routledge Focus on Public Governance in Asia).