Drivers and Consequences of Citizen Satisfaction: An Application of the American Customer Satisfaction Index Model to New York City

Using data from two telephone surveys of New York City residents conducted during 2000 and 2001, this article employs the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) model to examine the drivers—and behavioral consequences—of overall satisfaction with local government services. While the ACSI model has been widely used to analyze customer satisfaction in the private sector and, more recently, in the federal government, it has not been tried in a local government context. Applying the ACSI model to New York City, we find the perceived quality of public schools and especially the police, as well as road conditions and subway service, are the most salient drivers of satisfaction, but the significance of each service varies across income, race, and geography. For all groups in the city, overall satisfaction drives both trust in local government officials and intentions to move out of the city. Advantages and limitations of using the ACSI model to assess the quality of local government services are discussed.     

Long–Serving City Managers: Why Do They Stay?

The literature on council–manager government often mentions the political difficulties that city managers face with their elected officials and constituent groups. In addition, the generally accepted route to success for city managers is to move to larger and better–paying cities. As a result of these push–and–pull factors, the average tenure of city managers is short. There are, however, a relatively small number of city managers who enjoy long tenure in single cities. The authors identified the 146 city managers who are serving and have served for at least 20 years the same city and sought to determine the factors leading to their long service. The survey indicates that long–serving city managers are more likely to be found in smaller cities that are homogeneous and politically stable. The majority of these city managers are white males with above–average educational levels, strong support from elected officials, and personal commitments to the cities they serve.     

Interpretive policy inquiry: A response to its limitations

With positivist and technocratic notions still prevalent, Paul Healy's (1986) insightful effort to advance “interpretive policy inquiry” both underscores the limitations of conventional analysis and helps us to grasp the policy process in human terms. Yet the article falls short of a systematic presentation of the interpretive position and, in doing so, reveals the limitations of that approach: the need for an explicitly critical posture becomes clear. This point is made with particular attention to a pre-positivist figure, Machiavelli. An erratum to this article is available at .