IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/pubmgr/v17y2015i2p288-304.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Benchmarks and Citizen Judgments of Local Government Performance: Findings from a survey experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Étienne Charbonneau
  • Gregg G. Van Ryzin

Abstract

Government agencies can provide various benchmarks when reporting their performance to citizens, but not much is known about how citizens understand and respond to benchmarking information. Thus, this study aims to test what performance benchmarks appear most salient and persuasive to citizens. We conducted an online survey experiment in which n =595 respondents were randomized to different benchmarking information concerning fourth-grade reading proficiency of an elementary school. Our findings suggest that better school performance relative to the overall state average influenced respondents' ratings more than did performance relative to last year or similar schools. Improvement over last year, moreover, appears to be the least influential benchmark. The implication is that citizens find broad, comparative benchmarks to be the most persuasive and view reflexive benchmarks as less impressive, although confirmation of this conclusion is needed because of limitations in the design of the experiment.

Suggested Citation

  • Étienne Charbonneau & Gregg G. Van Ryzin, 2015. "Benchmarks and Citizen Judgments of Local Government Performance: Findings from a survey experiment," Public Management Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(2), pages 288-304, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:pubmgr:v:17:y:2015:i:2:p:288-304
    DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2013.798027
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14719037.2013.798027
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/14719037.2013.798027?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Carolyn‐Dung Thi Thanh Tran & Brian Dollery, 2021. "All in the Mind: Citizen Satisfaction and Financial Performance in the Victorian Local Government System," Australian Accounting Review, CPA Australia, vol. 31(1), pages 51-64, March.
    2. Amanda Rutherford & Thomas Rabovsky & Megan Darnley, 2021. "Compared to whom? Social and historical reference points and performance appraisals by managers, students, and the general public," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 4(1).
    3. Peter Rasmussen Damgaard & Poul A. Nielsen, 2020. "Does performance disclosure affect user satisfaction, voice, and exit? Experimental evidence from service users," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 3(2).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:pubmgr:v:17:y:2015:i:2:p:288-304. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RPXM20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.