Article

Demonstrating Public Service Responsiveness

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Abstract

For democracy to function effectively, public services must be responsive to citizen-user opinions and needs. Yet at the same time, elected officials and senior public managers must work to inform the opinions of the public so that their demands are realistic, fundable and something more than special interest. Democracy should thus be a two-way street. Most of the traffic, however, remains one-way. Despite the rigours of 'New Public Management', the imposition of ill-conceived performance indicators and the orientation to consumer choice, public services remain stubbornly resistant to reform. Indeed, there is now a well-evidenced gap between public organisations and the publics they serve, with services widely perceived as being centrally and target driven, out of touch and failing to address the issues their citizen-users consider relevant. Even where services have significantly improved, the public often rejects the evidence for such improvements, and are cynical about efforts to consult 'consumers' and seek public engagement. Such consultations are widely seen to have to have little impact on decision-making. There is a pressing need, therefore, to reconnect public services with their citizen-users. Indeed, a distinguishing feature of public services in a vibrant democracy is that they have high quality processes by which they interact with the public. Following such interactions, services must demonstrate their capacity to meaningfully respond to the needs and concerns articulated by citizen-users. The orientation to greater engagement with the public means more than conducting surveys of their preferences, or pandering to uninformed and unrealistic public demands. It must also include the careful provision of information, transparency of procedures, public engagement, chances for deliberation and concerted education. While it is certainly difficult to demonstrate responsiveness to informed public opinion in a methodologically defensible manner, in a democracy, no public service can afford not to be responsive to the informed opinions of the citizen-users they exist to serve. An 'intelligent' metric on public service responsiveness would, however, be most revealing. Drawing on existing indicators, it would assess the quality of the interactive process between public service providers and their citizen-users/stakeholders, highlight the success with which service organisations inform public opinion and show how effectively they respond to such opinions. A Public Service Responsiveness Index would add telling insights to existing measures of service efficiency and performance, and enable comparisons of service responsiveness within particular sectors. Responsiveness pertains to the quality of the interaction between a public service organisation and its citizen-users. Such interactions can include deliberative engagements with the public in goal-setting, planning, decision-making and service evaluation. They can also entail consultation initiatives to inform decision-making, satisfaction surveys and consumer feedback. Transparency of prodedures and access to information are also constitutive of high quality interactions with the public and are key to knowing citizen-user opinions. To be responsive, therefore, requires public managers to lead from behind; in other words, to seek out, enable and listen to the needs and opinions to which they will subsequently respond. Responsiveness, however, should not be confused with the extent to which an organisation reacts to the public's immediate opinions. There may be occasions when rapid reaction to public preferences is not an appropriate response. Organisational and policy leadership may be required to drive the process of informing public opinion or even resisting it. The task of informing and guiding public preferences thus embraces processes of education and information disemination. Deliberative initiatives are of particular importance here, as open and informed debate is an important part of forming opinion, and changing it. Responsiveness requires such initiatives, as well as evidence that educational efforts have changed public opinions; and still more evidence on what has been done to respond to them.

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... Table 3 summarizes the conditions that are expected to have a positive or negative influence on the safeguarding of transparency. Responsiveness, or answerability, refers to the idea that the public sector and its services and products should be responsive to the preferences and needs of citizens as well as to user opinion (Blaug and Lekhi 2009). According to Andrews and van de Walle (2012, 9), the level of responsiveness indicates how well governments meet the expectations of citizens and service users. ...
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