Measuring Street Cleanliness: A Comparison of New York City’s Scorecard and Results from a Citizen Survey

Abstract

Measuring Street Cleanliness 295Public administrators at the local level often rely on citizen surveys to measure the outcomes or accomplishments of their service delivery eff orts. However, many remain skeptical about the value of survey-based measures of local government performance, in large part because of the low empirical correlation between objective and subjective performance measures reported in the literature. Using data from New York City's street cleanliness scorecard, a well-established outcome measure, combined with responses from more than 4,000 respondents to a citizen survey, the authors fi nd a clear and consistent correlation between the scorecard and citizen ratings of street cleanliness in their neighborhoods. Moreover, the street cleanliness scorecard is a much stronger predictor of citizen ratings than demographic factors, trust in government, or contextual eff ects. Th ese results demonstrate that citizen judgments about government performance can correspond closely with more objectively measured outcomes -and that citizen surveys can provide valid and useful performance measures, at least for some local government services. M any local governments, both in the UnitedStates and in other countries, employ citizen surveys to obtain feedback on citizens' satisfaction with government-provided and governmentsupported services ( Miller and Miller 2000 ). Hatry and colleagues (1992) identify several types of information important to government agencies that can be gathered by surveying citizens or the users of public services, including customer ratings of service quality, participation rates and frequency of service use, suggestions for improving services, demographic diff erences, and unreported complaints. Citizen surveys are also commonly used as a proxy when more direct measurements of service outcomes or performance are diffi cult or costly to collect in other ways ( Miller and Miller 2000;Webb and Hatry 1973 ). Indeed, Morley, Bryant, and Hatry state, "Surveys of customers have begun to be perceived nationally, if not internationally, as a major source of evaluation feedback for public services and as an important component of public accountability" (2001, 53).Despite growing interest in the use of citizen surveys to measure government performance, public administrators and policy analysts remain deeply skeptical about the value of citizen surveys as a reliable gauge of true government performance.

Los límites de la lealtad ideológica en la evaluación ciudadana del "performance" administrativo local

“…Por lo tanto, nos unimos a las voces recientes que reconocen el valor de la percepción subjetiva como referente del performance administrativo (Van Ryzin et al, 2008;Shingler et al, 2008;Dalehite, 2008;Morgeson III y Mithas, 2009;James, 2009;Bruning, 2010, Chen et al, 2010, 25. El proceso explicativo que transforma la percepción de la calidad en intención de conducta es el objeto de un manuscrito de los mismos autores aún no publicado (Carreras y González, 2011b).…”

“…En la literatura administrativa de las dos últimas décadas, encontramos cada vez más autores que consideran al dato procedente de las encuestas al ciudadano como la única fuente válida para evaluar el desempeño de la acción administrativa 1 (Kelly y Swindell, 2002;Kelly, 2005;Licari et al, 2005;Van Ryzin, 2006Roch y Poister, 2006;James y John, 2007;Van Ryzin et al, 2008;Shingler et al, 2008;James, 2009;Morgeson III y Mithas, 2009;Chen et al, 2010;Bruning, 2010;Mizrahi et al, 2010;Carreras y González, 2011;Carreras y Carreras, 2011).…”

“…Para ser más concretos, la satisfacción sería la resultante de un proceso de «des-confirmación de las expectativas» en la percepción del servicio (Oliver, 1997). Ryzin et al, 2008;Carreras y Carreras, 2011). A pesar de su subjetividad, los juicios vertidos por la ciudadanía parecen tener capacidad para discriminar la calidad de los servicios, al menos por lo que se refiere a los servicios locales.…”

“…Ambos colectivos, desde sus posiciones respectivas, coinciden en reconocer los aspectos con peor y mejor calidad. Este resultado es congruente con las investigaciones que han demostrado la validez del juicio subjetivo del ciudadano para evaluar la acción administrativa local (Licari et al, 2005;Van Ryzin et al, 2008).…”

Inter-Municipal Cooperation and Satisfaction with Services: Evidence from the Norwegian Citizen Study

“…At least two studies find a strong correlation between the two in studies of the citizen ratings of street maintenance, park conditions (Licari et al, 2005), and street cleanliness (Van Ryzin et al, 2008). In other words, there is some evidence that citizens are able to judge the performance of some public services quite "accurately."…”