Only hearing what they want to hear: Assessing when and why performance information triggers intentions to coproduce

Abstract

While performance information is often used to communicate the importance of public policies and stimulate civic engagement, we know little about the processes that connect the two. This study proposes a conceptual model that links performance information to a specific form of public engagement: coproduction. Drawing on insights from information aversion theory, we argue that the effect of performance information on engagement in coproduction depends on levels of policy understanding and the valence of performance information that individuals are exposed to. Specifically, we predict that individuals exposed to positive performance information will understand the policy better than those exposed to negative performance information. Further, we predict that higher levels of policy understanding will increase coproduction engagement intentions. These predictions are examined using two experiments and a representative sample of US residents (n = 836). Findings indicate that participants best understood positive information and that understanding significantly increased coproduction engagement intentions.

The (Missing?) Role of Institutions in Behavioral Public Administration

“…In a recent paper, Porumbescu, Cucciniello, Belle and Nasi (2020) consider what schools -a formal institution -can do to encourage more parental engagement. They focused on school improvement plans, which are policies that are created annually to communicate school performance and measures adopted by individual schools and school districts to address issues related to student performance.…”

“…Scholars of public administration can chart a new course by theorizing about the behavioral model of decision-making within a system of political institutions; and by acknowledging that individual-level biases influence decisions and choices. 1 For instance, public administrators and other political elites exhibit behavioral biases through discrimination against minority identity groups. Further, individual-level attitudes and behaviors of administrators are affected by social psychological and other biases.…”

Does the Medium Matter? Linking Citizens’ Use of Communication Platform for Information about Urban Policies to Decision to Trust in Local Government

“…[12]). Citizens' satisfaction with government information provision can influnce their perceptions of government trustworthiness [41,42]. First, citizens' satisfaction with government information provision can lead them to believe that their government is being honest with them and not attempting to hide anything; previous research has suggested that information asymmetries are negatively related to trust in government [43].…”

Experimental research in the Asia-Pacific region: review and assessment of regional capacity

“…All of the studies reviewed in this article described in detail the measurement scales and operationalisation strategies adopted for the explanatory (treatment) and outcome variables. In terms of the sample selection, nine studies used a random sampling frame, such as probability (Kim, 2019), representative (Porumbescu et al, 2020) and stratified (Cai et al, 2020;Lee & Park, 2020a, 2020b sampling. The sampling approaches used in the remaining 21 studies were coded as non-random due to their explicit mention of having used a nonprobability (e.g., Kim & Kim, 2016a, 2016b, unrepresentative or convenience (Stroik et al, 2019) sampling method.…”

“…Of these, just over half examined PSM (e.g., Christensen et al, 2013;Kim & Kim, 2016a, 2016b, and leadership (e.g., Lee & Park, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c. Forty per cent of articles examined the citizen-government relationship, focusing on policy tools (Focacci & Lam, 2020;Moseley & Stoker, 2015;Park et al, 2020;Walker et al, 2020) and performance information use (Porumbescu et al, 2020;Walker et al, 2018). Other topics included the representativeness of local officials (Ryan et al, 2018), the effect of transparency on trust in government (Grimmelikhuijsen et al, 2013), how citizens' help deservingness shape discretional decision making (Lu et al, 2021), citizen satisfaction (Noda, 2020), cultural differences in perceptions of publicness and governmental performance (Walker et al, 2013) and government responsiveness to minority citizens (Newland & Liu, 2021).…”