How social capital shapes citizen willingness to co‐invest in public service: The case of flood control
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Author | Youlang Zhang,Xinsheng Liu,Arnold Vedlitz |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12646 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
How social capital shapes citizen willingness
to co-invest in public service: The case of flood
control
Youlang Zhang
1
|Xinsheng Liu
2
|Arnold Vedlitz
2
1
School of Public Administration and Policy,
Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
2
Institute for Science, Technology and Public
Policy, Bush School of Government and Public
Service, Texas A&M University, College
Station, Texas, USA
Correspondence
Xinsheng Liu, Institute for Science,
Technology and Public Policy, Bush School of
Government and Public Service, Texas A&M
University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
Email: x.liu@tamu.edu
Funding information
Institute for Science, Technology and Public
Policy, the Bush School of Government and
Public Service, Texas A&M University and the
Texas A&M University System's Area 41.
Abstract
Why are citizens in some communities more willing to co-
invest in public services than citizens in other communities?
Citizen co-investment has become an important policy tool
for governments to finance public services, yet little
research has theorized and empirically examined the
impacts of community contexts on citizens' willingness to
invest their personal resources in public services. As social
capital is often viewed as an important determinant of citi-
zen behaviours, we propose two competing hypotheses
explaining the relationship between social capital and citi-
zen co-investment: the facilitation effect hypothesis and
the inhibition effect hypothesis. Based on three data
sources, our statistical analyses consistently show that citi-
zens living in counties with more social capital are less will-
ing to co-invest in local flood control. This finding provides
empirical evidence to support the inhibition effect hypothe-
sis. Key implications of our research and suggestions for
future research are discussed in the conclusion.
1|INTRODUCTION
Why are citizens in some communities more willing to co-invest in public service than citizens in other communities?
Citizen co-investment refers to the process in which citizens invest with other citizens and governments in the provi-
sion of public services (Smith and Huntsman 1997). The prominent paradigms in public administration tend to view
citizens as customers or owners of government (Schachter 1995). In these paradigms, the theoretical role of citizens
in the citizen–government relationship is either over-passive or over-proactive and inconsistent with citizen behav-
iours in reality. From a value-centred perspective of citizen involvement, Smith and Huntsman propose that citizens
Received: 21 March 2019Revised: 25 July 2019Accepted: 6 December 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12646
696 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons LtdPublic Admin. 2020;98:696–712.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
should be viewed as ‘intelligent investors who coinvest their resources in the community and government, from
which they expect to receive value’(1997, p. 310). Specifically, citizens may invest their time or money over and
above tax dollars in public goods that are of particular benefit to them and expect a return in the near or long term.
The value-centred perspective is important because it could help refocus the citizen–government relationship on
value creation and explain why some citizens are more willing to pay for government programmes than others.
In particular, in a democratic context, citizens' willingness to co-invest can significantly affect the funding of public
policies through their choices and activities during polling, election, referenda or donation.
Nevertheless, despite the theoretical and practical importance of this value-centred perspective, little research in
the public administration literaturehas systematically examinedthe determinants of citizen willingness to co-investin a
public projector programme. Over the past several decades,citizen involvement in publicservice provision has become
an increasingly popular research topic. For instance, the concept of coproduction capturesa variety of processes in
which citizensare directly involved in the design,delivery, monitoring and evaluationof government services withpro-
fessional service agents (Ostrom 1996; Jo and Nabatchi 2016; Nabatchi et al. 2017), and coproduction studies have
widely explored the effects of organizational factors andcitizen characteristics on the establishment of coproduction
relations (Voorberg et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2019).Nevertheless, most previous coproduction researchhas focused on
citizens' voluntary behavioural supports instead of their monetary investments. Theoretical and empirical analyses of
citizen co-investment are still rare (Callahan 2007). Moreover, little is known about the systematic effects of commu-
nity characteristics on citizens' directinvestment in public services. In particular, we still do not know whethercitizens
from communitieswith more social capital are more or lesslikely to co-invest in public services.
Social capital involves trust, norms and networks that facilitate cooperation (Coleman 1988; Putnam 1993a).
Given the widely cited role of social capital in inducing collective action, promoting economic growth and fostering
political accountability, it is reasonable to expect that social capital will influence citizens' willingness to co-invest in
public services. Understanding the role of social capital in citizen co-investment is important because, on the theoret-
ical side, it can help shed new light on how public policy is financed in different contexts and how citizen choices are
made during specific policy processes, contributing to the study of citizen preferences and behaviours in modern
societies. On the practice side, knowing the relationship between social capital and citizens' willingness to co-invest
can help public administrators more realistically estimate the possible direct financial supports from local citizens and
create reasonable policy plans according to this information. Moreover, normatively, as social capital is not uniformly
distributed across communities, it can significantly shape the social equity of policy outputs by affecting the inputs
that citizens are willing to deliver to the provision of public services.
In this study, we examine why and how social capital shapes citizens' choices in terms of their engagement in
co-investment. The rest of this article proceeds in five sections. The first section presents a brief review of the
research literature on co-investment and citizen participation. The second section elaborates the two competing the-
oretical expectations and corresponding hypotheses that highlight the role of social capital in the process of citizen
co-investment. The third section describes our data sources and variable measures. The fourth section tests the two
hypotheses and presents the empirical findings. The final section concludes with a discussion of several key theoreti-
cal and practical implications of our research for public administration and public policy.
2|LITERATURE REVIEW
Citizen co-investment refers to the process in which citizens directly invest their resources, time, money or knowl-
edge in the provision of public services, from which they expect to receive return and value (Smith and Huntsman
1997; Callahan 2007). The traditional literature tends to conceptualize citizens as customers or owners in the
citizen–government relationship, and their roles include providing feedback to or supervising public managers
(Schachter 1995).Nevertheless, in practice, citizens are neither as passive (i.e., totally uninvolved withgovernment) as
customers nor as proactive (i.e., totally involved with government) as owners when dealing with governments. Smith
ZHANG ET AL.697
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