Bad government performance and citizens’ perceptions: A quasi-experimental study of local fiscal crisis
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211067085 |
| Author | Shugo Shinohara |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Bad government
performance and citizens’
perceptions: A quasi-
experimental study of local
fiscal crisis
Shugo Shinohara
Keio University, Japan
Abstract
The link between actual government performance and citizens’performance percep-
tions has been controversial. Given the prevalence of negativity bias, however, the
link between bad performance and citizens’perceptions could appear to be strong.
To explore this theoretically unconfirmed link, this study uses a quasi-experiment that
contrasts a Japanese town in fiscal crisis, involving tax increases and service cuts, with
a control village not in fiscal crisis. Using a difference-in-differences analysis with a care-
ful retrospective pretest, it finds negative effects of the fiscal crisis on citizens’process
perception, while it shows no effects on citizens’service satisfaction and trust in the
mayor, council, and administrators. The study further finds positive associations
between citizens’performance perceptions and civic engagement. It discusses these find-
ings to identify the boundary conditions in which a bad performance–negative percep-
tion link is likely to appear.
Points for practitioners
•Psychology literature on negativity bias suggests that the causal links and mechanisms
between bad performance and negative perceptions are stronger than those between
good performance and positive perceptions.
•Not only citizens, but also politicians and administrators, hold negativity bias. Their
blame-avoidance strategies could alleviate the growth of citizens’negative perceptions
with bad performance.
Corresponding author:
Shugo Shinohara, Faculty of Policy Management, Keio University, 5233 Endo, Fujisawa 252-0882, Japan.
Email: sshinoha@sfc.keio.ac.jp
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2023, Vol. 89(3) 722–740
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523211067085
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
•Participatory governance might moderate the bad performance–negative perception
link by placing citizens in a performance-improvement process and promoting their
interaction with government officials.
Keywords
Bad performance, behavioral public administration, experiment, Japan, local government,
satisfaction, trust
Introduction
Growing concerns with the negative image of government have urged governments
worldwide to measure and improve their performance. The implicit hypothesis behind
this performance movement is: “Citizens create negative perceptions when governments
perform poorly. Similarly, citizens create positive perceptions when governments
perform well.”Extant literature has identified this hypothesis as often invalid because
citizens combine various factors, such as beliefs, past experiences, or expectations,
with their judgment of government performance (Van de Walle and Bouckaert, 2003;
Van Ryzin, 2007; Yang and Holzer, 2006). However, these studies have not paid
much attention to the distinction between citizens’attitudinal responses to bad perform-
ance and those to good performance. Psychology literature on negativity bias suggests
that the causal link between bad performance and negative perceptions would be stronger
than that between good performance and positive perceptions (Baumeister et al., 2001;
Rozin and Royzman, 2001). Behavioral public administration studies have shown stron-
ger effects of negative information on citizens’perceptions of government performance
(James and Moseley, 2014; Olsen, 2015; van den Bekerom et al., 2021). While these
experiments reveal negativity bias in citizens’performance perceptions, this does not
necessarily mean that bad government performance is linked with citizens’perceptions
in the field. Specifically, unlike bad performance information designed for experiments,
government officials might attenuate the negative aspect of performance information to
avoid blame from citizens (Hood, 2007; Nielsen and Baekgaard, 2015). The questions
about whether and how actual bad performance is linked with citizens’perceptions
remain uncertain. Therefore, this study explores the link and mechanisms, using a real
case of municipal management failure.
For this purpose, the study uses a Japanese case of local fiscal crisis, involving tax
increases and service cuts. It constructs a quasi-experimental framework that contrasts
a treatment town in fiscal crisis to a control village not in fiscal crisis. Given the
absence of pretest data, causal inference rests on a difference-in-differences (DID)
design with a careful retrospective pretest. Data were collected from 600 randomly
sampled citizens with a response rate of 44%. Qualitative interviews were also conducted
to design the survey and interpret the experimental results. This study finds negative
effects of the fiscal crisis on citizens’process perception, while it finds no effects on
service satisfaction and trust in the mayor, council, and administrators. It also finds
Shinohara 723
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