Performance evaluations are a central component in the administration of public organizations. The predominant model of how both public managers and citizens evaluate performance suggests that satisfaction judgments about performance are based on a comparison of performance to some adapted standard like expectations or goals. However, in a number of experiments we show that perceptions of performance and satisfaction are formed in ways that are not so consistent and better explained by an intuitive mode of thinking. The results question the validity of citizen satisfaction as a measure of performance but also raise more general questions about how performance information is processed by citizens and public managers. Suggestions for a more adequate theory of the relationship between performance and satisfaction and implications for the use of performance information in public organizations are presented and discussed.

Expectations are thought to affect how citizens form their attitudes and behavior towards public services. Such attitudes may include citizen satisfaction, where expectations play a fundamental role, and relevant behaviors include choice of services and the decision to voice opinions about them. However, there are few investigations into what drives citizen expectations and even fewer that consider these relationships across time. This article tests whether prior expectations, perceived performance and citizen satisfaction influence future expectations, using a unique dataset that follows individual citizens across two subsequent school satisfaction surveys from 2011 and 2013. The results show that prior expectations have a large and consistent influence on future expectations, as predicted by the literature, whereas the influence from prior perceived performance seems less consistent. Prior satisfaction may also influence future expectations, although the effect is minor. The results indicate that citizens' expectations are rather stable across time and may contain normative values and beliefs about how public services should perform.

Citizen satisfaction surveys are used extensively throughout the public sector to assess the performance of public services and to inform decision‐makers. Recent research points to cognitive biases that may occur in citizens’ perceptions of performance of public services, but we know little about possible biases in the collection of these data. This shortcoming is addressed by investigating the priming and context effects that can arise from the structure of citizen surveys—for example, from the question order in the survey. Two independent experimental studies find that prior positively framed questions about police services affect subsequent satisfaction evaluations of other local public services. However, an informational prime about crime and unrelated questions about family‐life satisfaction have little effect on the subsequent satisfaction evaluations. The results show that citizen evaluations of public services can be influenced by irrelevant context effects, but this may depend on the topics of prior questions.

Citizens’ expectations are a primary source of information for politicians and public managers when developing public policies in democracies. Moreover, expectations are thought to have extensive influence on how citizens evaluate the resulting policy. If politicians want citizens who are satisfied with public services, they need to address these expectations. Theories of expectation formation tell us that two general forms of expectations exist: predictive and normative. Predictive expectations are about how a future service will be, whereas normative expectations concern how it shouldbe. But do citizens make this distinction? If they perceive and express their expectations differently than the theory predicts, it might affect the knowledge that we have on citizen expectations and their effects. This study investigates whether citizens have different interpretations of expectations and whether making them aware of the distinctions between predictive and normative expectations causes them to change their expectations. Results show that citizens interpret expectations very differently and that experimentally posing different questions about expectations at the same time merely increases the effect. The implications for the assessment of citizen expectations are discussed.

Not all citizens' voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them "coproducers") increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the education policy through government citizen surveys and their tendency to vote in elections. Among these normally underrepresented citizens, coproduction increased their propensity to voice their preferences to politicians through citizen surveys but not their tendency to vote. The effect on voicing in government citizen surveys tends to be larger among nonvoters. The results indicate how policies involving underrepresented citizens can raise the voices of people who would not otherwise be heard.

Public decision‐makers increasingly rely on satisfaction surveys to inform budget and policy decisions. Yet, our knowledge of whether, and under what conditions, this input from public service users provides valid performance information remains incomplete. Using a preregistered split‐ballot experiment among government grant recipients in Denmark, this article shows that the ordering of survey questions can bias satisfaction measures even for highly experienced and professional respondents. We find that asking about overall satisfaction before any specific service ratings lowers overall user satisfaction, compared to the reverse order, while the correlations between specific ratings and overall satisfaction are relatively stable. Also, the question order effect outweighs that of a large‐scale embezzlement scandal, which unexpectedly hit the investigated government agency during the data collection. Our results support rising concerns that subjective performance indicators are susceptible to bias. We discuss how practitioners should approach satisfaction surveys to account for the risk of question order bias.

Prior expectations are an important determining factor of how citizens evaluate politicians, government and public services. Typically, citizen expectations are divided into two main categories: predictive (“will”) expectations and normative (“should”) expectations. Theories of expectations say that predictive expectations are the sterile and indifferent prediction of future events, while normative expectations have a foundation in personal norms and values and express how the world should look according to the individual. Therefore, normative expectations should have antecedents more closely related to the individual’s personality than predictive expectations. However, these theoretical claims regarding the nature of the two different expectation types have not yet been tested empirically. Examining broad personality traits (Big Five) and The Maximizing Tendency trait, this exploratory study analyzes whether different personality antecedents explain the two types of expectations. Results show that the personality traits agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness correlate positively, and extraversion negatively, with normative expectations. None of the traits correlate with predictive expectations. These results have implications for politicians’ efforts to shape citizens’ expectations, the citizen satisfaction literature, including work considering the expectation-disconfirmation model, and for further research on citizen expectations.

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