Opposing Views on Public Ownership and Their Influence on Citizens’ Attitudes

We study the effects on citizens’ opinions of exposing them to opposing views in relation to the public vs private property nature of companies providing a public service. We focus on the issue of private vs public property of water distribution operators. Whether such operators should be publicly or privately owned is a hotly debated topic all over the world. The view of mainstream economic experts is rather agnostic about property. The crucial issue is considered to be the quality of the regulation of operators. However, there is also a broad citizen movement in favor of the opinion that water supply operators should be public property. In an online experiment we compare the effect on citizens’ opinions in Spain of three different texts: a neutral expository one, one which contains only arguments in favor of public operators and a third one which contains both the pro public property view and that of mainstream economic experts. We find that by itself the message of those in favor of public ownership does affect citizens opinion. However, the arguments of expert economists are effective at more than compensating the influence of the pro public companies arguments. This suggests that economists and expert thinking has a role to play in the public debate, beyond the role played in advising politicians or through the decision-making process in regulatory agencies.