Citizens' Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure: Experimental Evidence about Blame Reduction through Delegation and Contracting

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordTheories of blame suggest that contracting out public service delivery reduces citizens' blame of politicians for service failure. The authors use an online experiment with 1,000 citizen participants to estimate the effects of information cues summarizing service delivery arrangements on citizens' blame of English local government politicians for poor street maintenance. Participants were randomized to one of four cues: no information about service delivery arrangements, politicians' involvement in managing delivery, delegation to a unit inside government managing delivery, and delegation through a contract with a private firm managing delivery. The politicians managing delivery cue raises blame compared to citizens having no information. However, the contract with a private firm cue does not reduce blame compared to either no information or the politicians managing delivery cue. Instead, the delegation to a unit inside government cue reduces blame compared to politicians managing delivery, suggesting that delegation to public managers, not contracting, reduces blame in this context.Funding support is acknowledged from European Community's Seventh Framework Programme, Grant no. 266887, Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future

Marketisation Reforms and Coproduction: Does Ownership of Service Delivery Structures and Customer Language Matter?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordPublic services that are tax funded, public goods are sometimes marketised by being delivered using private companies instead of public organisations. Additionally, marketisation reforms can entail service users being described as customers for the service rather than as citizens.We assess the effects of these aspects of marketisation reforms on users’ willingness to coproduce public services. First, service delivery using private companies risksreducing users’ willingness to coproduce because firms cannot commit ex-ante to not appropriate donated labour for private gain. Second, using customer-oriented language risks reductions by priming individualistic market-norms that lower prosocial motivation compared to citizen-oriented language priming citizenship duty. Using three survey experiments in the United States we find that delivery structures are not neutral. Private firms delivering local public services reduce users’ willingness to coproduce, although similar effects are not evident from primimg customer rather than citizenship thinking

Does Work Quality Differ between the Public and Private Sectors? Evidence from Two Online Field Experiments

This is the final version. Available on open access from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: The data and code to reproduce the results reported in this article are available at the Open Science Foundation doi: https://osf.io/8f95q/Understanding the differences between working in the public and private sectors is core to public management research. We assess the implications of a theory of public ownership, testing an expectation that work is of higher quality when performed under public ownership status compared to a private company. We conducted two, pre-registered, field experiments with a routine data processing task and workers recruited through an online labor market. Workers were randomly allocated information about the ownership status of a nursing home as either a public organization or a private company. Work quality was measured as errors workers made in data entry and correcting pre-existing errors in work materials provided to them. The first experiment showed that fewer workers in the public, compared to the private, nursing home tended to make any data entry errors but that they did not correct more existing errors. Exploratory analyses showed a greater effect for those aware of the organization’s ownership status. To test this apparent sector attention effect, we conducted a second experiment with a 2-by-2 factorial design randomly allocating workers to a treatment making salient the public or private sector status of the organization, in addition to the initial public or private sector treatment. The results confirmed the effect of public sector status and sector attention in combination; workers who were assigned to a public sector organization rather than a private company and who were made aware of the respective sector status were more likely to perform their work tasks without any errors. We discuss the limits of the findings and their implications including that public organizations could boost the quality of work done by making their sector status more explicit to workers

Effects of privatization and agencification on citizens and citizenship: an international comparison

This study has been compiled as an internationally comparative contribution to the parliamentary inquiry by the Dutch Senate into the effects of privatization and agencification on the relationship between citizens and the (national) government. Knowledge on this topic is scarce and scattered across different sources. Therefore, this paper consists of three different sections. Each section deals with a different question and uses different sources. In this overview we summarize the main findings of the three sections

Strict enforcement or responsive regulation? How inspector–inspectee interaction and inspectors’ role identity shape decision making

In line with a general trend towards more responsive regulation, inspectors are expected to take inspectees’ needs and demands in account when making decisions. At the same time, inspection services increasingly apply instruments aimed at directing the inspectors’ actions. These contradictory signals can make the work of inspectors very difficult. By reviewing relevant literature, this chapter shows that not only inspectees’ behavior and characteristics, but also inspectors’ professional role identity, i.e. the way inspectors view their professional role, is critical to explain and predict decision making on the ground

Generating Usable Knowledge through an Experimental Approach to Public Administration: Symposium Introduction

This introduction to the symposium on experimental methods in public administration shows how using experimental methods generates not only research that is empirically credible, but also relates to the real world of public administration. The ten articles in the symposium subject classic public administration theories or hypotheses that have been generated in nonexperimental research to rigorous testing using experimental methods. The first group of articles consists of studies with citizens who interact with government. The second group consists of three studies with public officials

Public Sector Reform in the Netherlands – Views and Experiences from Senior Executives: COCOPS National Report for The Netherlands

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The impact of public sector reform in Europe on social cohesion

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