Expectations,performance, and citizen satisfaction with urban services

The expectancy disconfirmation model has dominated private‐sector research on customer satisfaction for several decades, yet it has not been applied to citizen satisfaction with urban services. The model views satisfaction judgments as determined—not just by product or service performance—but by a process in which consumers compare performance with their prior expectations. Using data from a New York City citizen survey, this study finds that citizen expectations, and especially the disconfirmation of expectations—factors that previously have not been considered in empirical studies of the determinants of citizen satisfaction—play a fundamental role in the formation of satisfaction judgments regarding the quality of urban services. Interestingly, the modeling results suggest that urban managers should seek to promote not only high‐quality services, but also high expectations among citizens. Additional implications for research and public management practice are discussed. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Decentralization and citizen trust: An empirical study of policing in more and less developed countries

Decentralization is argued to enhance citizen–government relationships and, thus, to lead to higher levels of citizen trust. General purpose policing encompasses various services that might be assigned to different levels of governments. The literature lacks generalizable studies of the effects of the structural arrangements of police systems on police performance. This study is a cross‐national exploration of the relationship between the varying degrees of police decentralization and police performance as measured by citizen trust in the police. It uses a measure of decentralization of police systems based on the tiers of government with some control over police. Results show that, in the 72 sample countries, the relationship between citizen trust in police and decentralized police systems is not statistically significant. However, when the countries are categorized by the Human Development Index, decentralized police systems tend to be positively related to citizen trust in the more developed countries but inversely in the less developed countries.     

The Europeanisation of conflict: Reflections from a social movement perspective

If Europe is becoming a polity, then regular patterns of social and political conflict ‐ both institutional and non‐institutional ‐ will emerge between citizen groups and decision‐making authorities. Although we are beginning to have a substantial body of research on institutionalised interest group interaction at the European level, we know much less about non‐institutionalised forms of contentious collective action that have European policies as their targets. Using social movement theory, several varieties of such collective action can be identified. Based on the theory of political opportunity structure, it is shown why one of these forms ‐ actions intended to bring national states’ power to bear against European policies — appears to have a rich and turbulent future.     

Preventing the Use of Deadly Force: The Relationship between Police Agency Policies and Rates of Officer‐Involved Gun Deaths

Killings of civilians by police officers have become a matter of intense public concern in the United States. High‐profile deaths, especially those of black citizens, have caused outrage and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement with calls for dramatic changes in how police agencies operate. However, little systematic research exists to answer questions about which policies should be ended or put in place to reduce these deaths. The authors leverage a large data set of gun deaths by police officers in the United States, combined with agency‐level policy data and community demographic data, to examine whether certain policies are associated with lower or higher rates of officer‐involved gun deaths. Findings show that one policy—the requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fire—is associated with significantly lower rates of gun deaths.     

Restoring Ethnic Democracy: The Or Commission and Palestinian Citizenship in Israel

Israel's Palestinian citizens have historically enjoyed limited individual rights, but no collective rights. Their status as rights-bearing citizens was highlighted in 1967, with the imposition of Israel's military rule on the non-citizen Palestinians living in the occupied territories. It was the citizenship status of its Palestinian citizens that qualified Israel, a self-defined “Jewish and democratic state”, as an “ethnic democracy”. In October 2000 Israeli police killed 13 citizen Palestinians who participated in violent but unarmed demonstrations to protest the killing of non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories. Both the citizen Palestinian demonstrators and the police were engaged in acts of citizenship: the former were asserting their right as Israeli citizens to protest the actions of their government in the occupied territories, while the latter attempted to deny them that right and erase the difference between citizen and non-citizen Palestinians. Significantly, no Jewish demonstrator has ever been killed by police in Israel, no matter how violent his or her behavior. In November 2000 a commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate the killings. Its report, published in September 2003, is yet another act of citizenship: it seeks to restore the civil status of the citizen Palestinians to where it was before October 2000, that is, to the status of second-class citizens in an ethnic democracy. The Commission sought to achieve this end by undertaking a dual move: while relating the continuous violation of the Palestinians' citizenship rights by the state, it demanded that they adhere to their obligation to protest this violation within the narrow limits of the law. This article's key question is: could the Commission, by viewing the behavior of the Palestinian protestors as legitimate civil disobedience, have encouraged the evolution of Israel from an ethnic to a liberal democracy?     

Citizen oversight of independent police services: Bifurcated accountability,regulation creep,and lesson learning

By examining developments in England and Wales this article considers police reform in the context of the tension between operational independence and citizen oversight. The article assesses the nexus between regulation and accountability in order to shed light on how a bifurcated accountability paradigm has protected police autonomy. Particular significance is attached to the cold‐blooded police shooting of an innocent man as a critical moment in the recent history of police governance. The lesson‐learning strategy of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, created under the Police Reform Act 2002, is singled out as an important driver of police reform. Although police governance reform in England and Wales is context specific, it is held that appreciation of the regulation accountability nexus and complaints as lesson‐learning opportunities are of significance in other jurisdictions and sectors.     

Advancing Human Rights Policy: Does Grassroots Mobilization and Community Dispute Resolution Matter? Insights from Chiapas,Mexico

This research examines the impact of grassroots organizing at the community level in Chiapas, Mexico, to address problems associated with human rights advocacy and implementation. Traditionally, the nation‐state has had the primary responsibility to address issues pertaining to human rights violations and the enforcement of international human rights principles and treaties. Local political struggles and acts of resistance by disenfranchised groups in Mexico offer insight to understand the impact of indigenous and other social movements in furthering human rights. Indigenous populations in the state of Chiapas use local community dispute resolution to contest the inadequacy of the state in responding to the problems that give rise to poverty, lack of human dignity, educational access, racial and ethnic discrimination, lack of political participation in government and the right to equality in economic, social, and political sectors. Drawing from research based on participant observations in Chiapas, Mexico, there is some evidence to suggest that since the 1994 EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) uprising several micro‐level political and social movements have contested the power of the state through symbolic and pragmatic organizing efforts. These groups include, but are not limited to, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women's groups, and indigenous groups. After the Zapatista uprising, these groups were instrumental in making claims against the state through numerous activities: protests to end the war, the development of NGOs to observe human rights violations, civilian‐based Zapatista support groups (base de apoyo), peace camps, and open dialogue with the EZLN. I argue that collective mobilization in local communities serves both symbolic and pragmatic efforts in helping disenfranchised groups empower themselves to address economic, social, and political inequality. Local‐level activism has fueled a sense of self‐empowerment to change state institutional responses and to involve sectors of civil society domestically and internationally to initiate a proper resolution of issues that are fundamentally related to human rights.     

Will They Even Hear Me? How Race Influences Citizen Complaint Outcomes

Abstract

Scholarship has explored how representation influences policing services, but little is known as to what effect officer and citizen race influences outcomes related to police misconduct cases. This analysis of the Indianapolis and New Orleans police department applies representative bureaucracy theory to create expectations on how race impacts citizen complaint cases. The findings indicate that Black citizens are more likely to have their complaint sustained when filed against a White officer compared to a White citizen. Moreover, male citizens are less likely to have their complaint sustained compared to females.     

Serving Clients When the Server Crashes: How Frontline Workers Cope with E‐Government Challenges

Implementing e‐government in the contemporary American state is challenging. E‐government places high technical demands on agencies and citizens in an environment of budget austerity and political polarization. Governments developing e‐government policies often mobilize frontline workers—also termed “street‐level bureaucrats”—to help citizens gain access to services. However, we know little about how frontline workers cope in these challenging circumstances. This article fills this gap by examining frontline workers implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Based on a qualitative analysis, the authors find that frontline workers “move toward clients” when coping with stress: they bend the rules, work overtime, and collaborate in order to help clients. They are less inclined to “move away” or “move against” clients, for instance, through rigid rule following and rationing. In other words, frontline workers try to serve clients, even “when the server crashes.” Frontline workers, then, can play a vital role in the successful implementation of e‐government policies.     

Frontline worker compliance with transparency reforms: Barriers posed by family and financial responsibilities

Significant development funding flows to informational interventions intended to improve public services. Such “transparency fixes” often depend on the cooperation of frontline workers who produce or disseminate information for citizens. This article examines frontline worker compliance with a transparency intervention in Bangalore's water sector. Why did compliance vary across neighborhoods, and why did workers exhibit modest rates of compliance overall? Drawing on ethnographic observation and an original data set, this article finds that variation in workers' family responsibilities and financial circumstances largely explains variation in compliance with the intervention. Furthermore, workers often prioritize long‐standing responsibilities over new tasks seen as add‐ons, leading to modest rates of compliance overall. Perceptions of “core” jobs can be sticky—especially when reaffirmed through interactions with citizens. This article represents one of the first multimethod companions to a field experiment, and illustrates how the analysis of qualitative and observational data can contribute to impact evaluation.     

In Search of Society? The Limitations of Citizen‐Centred Governance

Democratic governments have spent much of the last two decades attempting to recalibrate their governance systems around a single focal entity: the citizen. The all‐pervasive rhetoric of citizen‐centred governance has seen policies conceived, delivered and evaluated in terms of the satisfaction levels achieved by individual ‘citizens’. This article argues that by disaggregating societal interests down to the smallest available individual unit – the citizen – policy makers have created unrealistic expectations of individual participation, leading to public distrust when ‘citizen‐centred’ rhetoric does not match reality. Simultaneously, the focus on individual outcomes has narrowed the policy‐making gaze away from wider society‐level measures that could create more robust policy options in the face of ‘hard choices.’ The result – paradoxically – is that the more government focuses on pleasing the individual citizen, the less trusting those citizens are of government's ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.     

Turning defiance into compliance with procedural justice: Understanding reactions to regulatory encounters through motivational posturing

This paper uses Braithwaite's motivational posturing framework to explain how individuals react to encounters with regulatory authorities. Of interest is whether procedural justice can reduce defiance and improve self‐reported compliance among individuals who are either resistant or dismissive of regulatory authority. Using longitudinal survey data collected from tax offenders (Study 1), and individuals who had a recent police‐citizen interaction (Study 2), it will be shown that procedural justice can promote compliance behavior. Procedural justice is also found to be effective for reducing resistant forms of defiance over time, but not dismissive defiance. Further, the results reveal that neither resistant defiance nor dismissive defiance moderate the effect of procedural justice on compliance, suggesting procedural justice works equally well for both low and high resisters and low and high disengagers. Finally, an unexpected result reveals that resistance, but not dismissive defiance, mediates the effect of procedural justice on self‐reported compliance behavior. The findings have implications for procedural justice research and for the regulation of defiance.     

Citizen co‐production of cyber security: Self‐help,vigilantes, and cybercrime

Given the limited resources and capabilities of states to maintain cyber security, a variety of co‐production efforts have been made by individuals or by collectives, of varying degrees of organization and coordination. This article identifies different forms of citizen co‐production of cyber security and notes the risk of unintended consequences. Safeguards and principles are proposed in order to facilitate constructive citizen/netizen co‐production of cyber security. Although co‐production of security can contribute to social control, only those activities within the bounds of the law should be encouraged. Activities of private citizens/netizens that test the limits of legality should be closely circumscribed.     

Tullock contests of weakly heterogeneous players

I explore asymmetric equilibria in a Tullock contest of heterogeneous players in the case when the players’ heterogeneity is weak, and the effort optimization problem can be analyzed in the linear approximation. With increasing discriminatory power of the contest, players sequentially drop out. The corresponding threshold values of the discriminatory power are related to those identified earlier for a Tullock contest of identical players. Weak heterogeneity, however, is sufficient to make the players’ behavior strongly asymmetric and qualitatively alter the structure of the equilibria as compared to the homogeneous case.     

Presidential Address: “A Thousand Petty Fortresses”: Administrative Burden in U.S. Immigration Policies and Its Consequences

Contradictory elements in U.S. immigration policy, reflecting a long‐time struggle between inclusionary and exclusionary views, have resulted in federal legislation filled with compromises and tradeoffs that, at state and sub‐state levels, play out in unclear interpretations and uneven, highly discretionary administration and enforcement of immigration law and policy. This research describes a tool of discretionary administration—administrative burden—that is increasingly used in enforcing immigration law and policies at state and sub‐state levels and presents a theoretical frame for more fully investigating and addressing its consequences. The application and implications of administrative burden are explored empirically and qualitatively in a case study analysis of an enforcement‐oriented policy change in Texas that denied access to birth certificates for some citizen‐children born to Mexican immigrants. To better understand the potential consequences of this and related policies, interviews with immigrant parents and longitudinal data from a survey of children of immigrants are analyzed to assess both short‐term and later outcomes of children who are denied economic assistance and other benefits under policies that impose barriers to their integration into society. The study findings point to serious, adverse consequences for citizen children of state and sub‐state immigration policies that create administrative burden and perpetuate racial discrimination, while simultaneously diminishing the transparency, fairness, and effectiveness of public administration.     

Government Communication Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Police Performance: A Large‐Scale Survey Study

For the last two decades, performance management theories and practices have focused on outcome‐oriented management but have paid little attention to the role of public communication. Using multiple large data sets from Kansas City, Missouri, for 2009–14, this research suggests that the perceived effectiveness of public communication has a more substantial impact on public satisfaction with police protection and crime prevention than neighborhood crime rates and broken windows factors and that perceived effectiveness moderates the negative impact of crime rates. After controlling for residents’ demographic characteristics, the authors find that the perceived effectiveness of communication is associated with public satisfaction with the content and quality of the city website and the government television channel. The implications for public safety management and police–citizen relations as well as directions for future research on public communication strategies and public performance management are presented.     

The Potential for Public Empowerment through Government‐Organized Participation

This article develops a better theoretical understanding of the linkage between the processes and outcomes associated with government‐organized public participation, including its potential to empower citizens in guiding administrative decisions. Special focus is given to those factors that shape the development and maintenance of the citizen–administrator relationship. To this end, the research examines the work of federally mandated citizen review panels and their interactions with state child protection agency administrators. Based on 52 in‐depth interviews conducted with citizens and administrators in three U.S. states, a grounded theory approach is employed to derive a series of testable theoretical propositions. The insights gained are of importance not only to public administration scholars but also to citizens and administrators who engage one another through formally organized channels of participation.     

‘New spaces’ for change?: Diamond governance reforms and the micro‐politics of participation in post‐war Sierra Leone

While the majority of research carried out on diamonds and development in Sierra Leone has focused on debates concerning the role that diamonds played in the country's civil war of the 1990s, little attention has been directed towards understanding how the emergence and consequences of ‘new spaces’ for citizen engagement in diamond governance are shaping relationships between mining and political economic change in the post‐war period. Recent fieldwork carried out in two communities in Kono District illustrates how the emergence of such spaces—although much celebrated by government, donors and development practitioners—may not necessarily be creating the ‘room for manoeuvre’ necessary to open up meaningful public engagement in resource governance. The analysis focuses on one recent governance initiative in the diamond sector—the Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF)—which aims to strengthen citizen participation in decision‐making within the industry, but has frequently been at the centre of controversy. In framing and articulating socio‐environmental struggles over resource access and control in Sierra Leone's post‐war period of transition, the article highlights how the emerging geographies of participation continue to be shaped by unequal power relationships, in turn having an impact on livelihood options, decision‐making abilities and development outcomes in the country's diamondiferous communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.