Citizen expectations and satisfaction of service performance: lessons from subnational governments in Japan

Abstract

This article evaluates differences in the effects of citizen expectations and satisfaction in relation to city and prefectural government service performance as bases for detecting effects in the vertical relationships of subnational governments. The results show that the expectations of prefectural governments have a higher impact on satisfaction than the expectations of cities. They indicate that increasing the expectations and related action of prefectural governments would be an effective way of improving citizen satisfaction with the service performance of local governments.

Keywords:

• performance expectations and satisfaction
• subnational governments
• city governments
• prefectural governments
• Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was kindly supported by the JSPS KAKENHI [16K03494, 19K01490]; Toyohashi research grant for academia-government collaboration [FY2017].