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Trust in Public Performance Information: The Effect of Data Accessibility and Data Source
Abstract
Building on transparency literature, we theorize that information characteristics such as accessibility of raw data and data source provision influence citizens’ trust in public performance information. Next to the question of whether providing a data source matters, we argue that information provision from a non‐government actor can compensate the information asymmetry between citizens and public sector organizations due to a stronger symmetric data exchange relationship. Integrating and elaborating these theoretical assumptions of principal‐agent theory with bureaucratic reputation theory, the organization's reputation, rather than the stakeholder group the information provider is belonging to, may explain varying trust. We conduct eight online experiments in large‐N data collections in Austria and Germany, and find that data accessibility and source provision increase trust in performance information. Whereas citizens have more trust in government‐provided data compared to data provided by other citizens, source reputation matters dominantly for building trust in performance information. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
... As the article title implies, these findings suggest that police officers do not blindly trust AI technologies, but follow AI recommendations that confirm their preconceived preferences. Schmidthuber, Willems, and Krabina (2023) utilize a series of online experiments in large-N data collections in Austria and Germany to explore the effect of data accessibility and data source provision on trust in performance information; they find increases in both cases. Whereas citizens have more trust in government-provided data relative to data provided by other citizens, source reputation is essential for building trust in performance information. ...
Reporting government performance to the public is key tool in improving accountability. Some evidence, however, has shown that individuals’ anti-public sector biases may distort performance information about public organizations. Using an experimental vignette on U.S. nursing homes, this study fills four gaps in the literature: 1) the need to include nonprofit organizations rather than just public and for-profit, 2) consideration of the credibility of the source of performance information, 3) the use of simple commonly used performance metrics, and 4) the willingness to use services as a performance dimension. We find the public has a general but modest anti-for-profit sector bias in nursing home care with nonprofits perceived the most positively. Sector biases generally disappear when clear performance data are presented. The credibility of the source matters, and respondents’ willingness to use organizational services is more sensitive to both sector bias and performance ratings than are performance measures.
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This article argues and shows that performance narratives affect how and for what purposes managers use performance information independently of other known drivers of performance information use, such as the external environment and individual intra- and inter-organizational characteristics. Using a survey experiment on 514 Danish public school managers, we find an asymmetrical effect of ‘decline narratives’ (declining performance) and ‘increase narratives’ (improving performance). In line with expectations drawing on literature on negativity bias and blame-avoidance, we find that ‘decline narratives’ lead to higher internal use (learning and control purposes) of performance information. In contrast, ‘increase narratives’ lead to higher external use (giving account and building support purposes) of performance information. Further exploratory analysis suggests that internal use is not affected by narratives when managers are skeptical of the performance measure. More skeptical managers are, however, willing to use performance information with an ‘increase narrative’ for external use.
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Social accountability reforms emphasize expanding performance information disclosure and incorporating citizen feedback into performance evaluations of public organizations.However, social accountability scholarship has largely ignored possible discriminatory implications of performance information use despite calls for more social equity research. We look to bridge these two literatures, arguing that increasing exposure to performance information can actually activate racial bias in citizen feedback. Using two samples of White MTurk participants residing in the United States, we test this argument in a Negative Performance Information Study (n = 800) and a Positive Performance Information Study (n = 800). In the Negative Performance Information Study, we find increased exposure to negative performance information triggers more negative performance evaluations of public organizations led by Black public managers, but not White public managers, and strengthens preferences to fire Black public managers, but not White public managers. In the Positive Performance Information Study, we find increased exposure to positive performance information has no impact on performance evaluations of Black, nor White public managers but strengthens preferences to reappoint White, but not Black public managers. These findings suggest increasing exposure to performance information triggers racial bias in performance evaluations and preferences for holding public managers accountable.
This article addresses the Norwegian government’s meaning-making, crises communication and reputation management during the Corona pandemic crisis. It argues that reputation management can be seen as a combination of governance capacity and legitimacy reflected in a well performing crisis communication and meaning-making. Under the slogan “working together” the government emphasized the need for a supportive and cohesive culture in order to to balance efforts at increasing governance capacity as well as governance legitimacy, through shaping a common understanding and broad consensus on what the crisis was about and what needed to be done to deal with it. A main lesson learned from the Norwegian case is that the effectiveness of the government in controlling the pandemic was enhanced by successful meaning-making and communication with the public, and to the high level of citizens’ trust in government.
The open government paradigm implies public processes are becoming more transparent, public information is available online, and citizens and non‐governmental organizations are encouraged to interact with public administration through new platform‐based forms of participation and collaboration. Though these governmental efforts to open up organizational procedures to the public are meant to strengthen the relationship between citizens and the government, empirical evidence is currently sparse and mixed. This article argues that positive impacts of openness depend on citizens’ democratic capacity defined as individual sense of empowerment to influence governmental systems. By matching individual survey data from the European Social Survey with secondary institutional data the authors investigate the relationship between individual and structural level variables. Findings indicate that structural openness is, in general, positively associated with higher trust. Further, the effect of openness on public trust is partially mediated by an individual's perception that they have meaningful opportunities for political participation.
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We explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We discuss how reputation‐building impacts both the ability and motivation of principals to oversee administrative policymaking. We argue that reputation‐sourced authority eschews ex ante incentives through the claims‐making and maneuvering of bureaucrats as they develop reputations with audiences. At the same time, it de‐legitimizes ex post oversight because monitoring and compliance must compete with both reputational authority and with resistance from the audiences that are the very sources of such authority.
Existing research shows that open government can result in better governance outcomes. However, there remains a gap in our understanding of how open government’s two component dimensions of transparency and participation – “vision” and “voice” – affect governance outcomes, and how they relate to each other within public decision-making. We use a survey experiment to test the impact of transparency and participation on a range of governance outcomes (satisfaction, perception of fairness, and trust) in a municipal decision-making process. The findings show that both transparency and participation positively affect these governance outcomes. However, we do not find support for an interaction effect of transparency and participation. Implications for research and practitioners are discussed.
In public administration today, many new reform ideas mingle, offering new diagnoses of governmental problems and courses of action. But scholars have highlighted reasons why we should doubt the optimistic claims of reformists. A new set of policy tools called “open government” arrived nearly a decade ago, and scholars have not yet explained its origins or prospects as specific approach to management reform. In this article, we address this lacuna. We compare open government with three other historic reforms, and analyze how likely its ideas are to bear fruit. In so doing, we introduce a framework for evaluating risks inherent in any new reform approach. We conclude that the challenges faced by open government are both new and old, but—like all reform approaches—they result from management challenges in reconciling competing interests and values that raise tensions and can lead to unexpected consequences. We argue that these will need careful attention if the open government approach is to have any hope of succeeding.
The opening of data has been credited for improving transparency and for providing a window on government functioning. Although this relationship is intuitively apparent, it is in fact complex and the mere opening of data might not actually yield transparency. In this paper, a comprehensive model of determinants that enable or impede transparency enabled by open government data and the expected effects have been derived by surveying public administration and information systems literature. Public administration literature tends to be focused on factors such as participation and trust, whereas information systems literature focuses on factors such as user interface, user experience, and data quality. Digital government literature attempts to bridge these elements. The Window Theory is introduced, in order to unify existing models by integrating a broad range of factors within a single model. The Window Theory can be used to develop context-dependent models that are both comprehensive and parsimonious.
Accountability mechanisms have been widely applied to public agencies to achieve intended goals since ‘new public management’ paradigm. However, our understanding of the relationship between institutional accountability and agency performance is limited by a lack of empirical research. This study examines deficits of three accountability mechanisms applied to policy implementation process–1) information provision, 2) assessment, and 3) consequence, representing bureaucratic control in performance-accountability regime of the Bush Administration. Results inform that there were relative success and failure of three accountability mechanisms for federal agency while they positively influenced agency performance. This study contributes to the development of institutional accountability theory.
Decision transparency is often proposed as a way to maintain or even increase citizen trust, yet this assumption is still untested in the context of regulatory agencies. We test the effect of transparency of a typical decision tradeoff in regulatory enforcement: granting forbearance or imposing a sanction. We employed a representative survey experiment (n = 1,546) in which we test the effect of transparency in general (providing information about a decision or not) and the effect of specific types of transparency (process or rationale transparency). We do this for agencies supervising financial markets, education, and health care. We find that overall decision transparency significantly increases citizen trust in only two of the three agencies. Rationale transparency has a more pronounced positive effect only for the Education Inspectorate. We conclude that the overall effect of decision transparency is positive but that the nature of the regulatory domain may weaken or strengthen this effect.
In recent years, one of the main expectations of officials and politicians is to increase citizens’ trust in institutions as a result of openly disclose public data. This paper provides empirical evidence for 18 European countries on the significant and positive direct relationship between open government data and institutional trust, but there still exist areas for development. The mediating role of citizens’ satisfaction between open government data and trust is also confirmed. In addition, the moderation effect of social and demographic variables reveals a higher relationship for people highly educated, who are under 65 and access the Internet daily.
This study explores the impact of the configuration of performance information on citizens' perceptions regarding the impact of the information on their lives and the reliability they assign to it. We conducted a survey experiment among a representative sample of the Israeli population. The treatment included the object being measured, the identity of those who manage the performance management mechanism, and the trend of the results. We also compared the education and police sectors. Our findings indicate that overall, citizens feel that performance information has only a low‐medium effect on their lives, and assign a similar level of reliability to that information. The configuration of performance information helps explain this perceived impact only to a limited extent. These findings question the usefulness of performance reporting mechanisms as a major tool for strengthening accountability and raise serious doubts about the possible ways to improve these mechanisms and make them more effective.
Performance information research has grown rapidly over the last decade with much research emphasizing the importance of how information is framed, presented, and communicated by using a distinct rhetorical appeal. In this study, we examine how the framing, format, and rhetoric of performance information influences preferences among elected politicians. We study the direct effects of how information is presented. We also argue that performance information is always a mixture of different frames, formats, and rhetorical appeals and that it is therefore important to account for interaction effects. Using a large-scale survey experiment with responses from 1,406 Italian local politicians, we find that framing and ethos-based rhetoric affect politicians’ responses to performance information. We also find that the format of presentation is important in several ways. Thus, politicians are more likely to support the status quo when information is presented graphically rather than textually, and a graphical format furthermore reduces the impact of ethos-based rhetoric and – to a lesser extent – the impact of equivalence framing.
There is a broad academic discussion about the impact of funding grants from a foundation or a government department on individual support intentions toward the nonprofit organization receiving the grant. However, the role of the grant provider's reputation has frequently been overlooked. In this study, we experimentally tested whether there is a reputation spillover effect of a grant‐providing organization. Based on a real‐life example, we asked citizens to rate their willingness to donate to a nonprofit organization, and we experimentally manipulated the available information on funding sources. We test this for both a government department and a foundation as a grant provider. Our results suggest that not the act of receiving a grant, but the citizens' awareness about the funding organization—at least in the case of a foundation—has an impact on support intentions. In contrast, for a prominent government department as a grant provider, we did not find support for a reputation spillover effect.
U.S. cities, among the vanguards of open data globally, are investing in renewed efforts to support Open Government with the creation of open data portals that are used to provide machine-readable administratively collected data sets. Transparency of the public sector is still widely seen as the main outcome of these efforts. Such a simplistic view, however, misses the rich variety of innovations resulting from open data use. We conceptualize these innovation outcomes across two dimensions: internal/external and product/process. Interviews with 15 city managers in the U.S. who are responsible for the implementation of open data policies were conducted to compare policy intentions, perceived innovation outcomes as well as actual ones. The findings show that, product-centric outcomes are predominant and relate mainly to external innovation, including applications, websites, new services. Process-centric outcomes constitute rather internal innovation, such as internal procedural changes and the revival of the internal innovation culture in government. We close with a set of recommendations for open data efforts in government that include structural, procedural, as well as cultural changes for successful open data initiatives.
Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This review synthesizes prior crowdsourcing research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of crowdsourcing in the public sector. It identifies three distinct categories of crowdsourcing: organizations, products and services, and holistic systems. Lessons about the fundamental logic of process design—alignment, motivation, and evaluation—identified across the three categories are discussed. Conclusions drawn from past studies and the resulting evidence can help public managers better design and implement crowdsourcing in the public sector.
International organizations are an alternative to national governments as a source of information for citizens about governments’ performance. Experiments about high UK e-government performance reported in an international ranking find a United Nations (UN) source increases citizens’ perceptions of the truthfulness of reported performance and increases perceived high performance compared to national government reporting identical information. The UN source also has higher perceived honesty, helpfulness and knowledgeability. A replication experiment in the Netherlands generalizes the finding about perceived higher truthfulness. International sources boost the credibility of information about high performance, improving citizens’ perceptions of national governments.
Innovation in government is about finding new ways to improve
society, the government itself and the relationship between
the government and the public. Data-driven
innovation can result in a dramatic transformation of public
sector systems. Data-driven innovation requires technological
innovation capabilities needed for collecting, opening and
sharing, combining, and analyzing data.
Today, performance measurement is a widely accepted tool of government management in the United States. At the national level, the George W. Bush administration has adopted the Performance Assessment Rating Tool to integrate performance measurement into strategic planning and budgeting (Breul and Moravitz, 2007). Many US state and local governments and professional organizations also have their own initiatives to promote performance measurement, “results-oriented” management, and public performance reporting (Berman and Wang, 2000; Jordan and Hackbart, 1999; Melkers and Willoughby, 2001; Poister and Streib, 1999).
Drawing on insights from social networks, social cognition and the study of emotions, this conceptual article offers a set of ideas and a series of predictions on how systematic variation in two sets of relationships may bear on agency behav-ior. The first is the agency-audience relationship which revolves around how and what multiple audiences think about public agencies, how these thoughts impact upon agency behavior, how information regarding this behavior is trans-formed within multiple audiences and how it influences audience memory and behavior regarding that agency. The second is the relationship between the reputation of an agency head and the reputation of that agency. The article identifies six broad areas that offer the most promising possibilities for future research on bureaucratic reputation, call-ing on researchers to incorporate insights from the aforementioned literatures, to dimensionalize these sets of rela-tionships and to assess the generalizability of reputation’s effects.
Open government is an important innovation to foster trustworthy and inclusive governments. The authors develop and test an integrative theoretical framework drawing from theories on policy diffusion and innovation adoption. Based on this, they investigate how structural, cultural, and environmental variables explain three dimensions of open government: accessibility, transparency, and participation. The framework is tested by combining 2014 survey data and observational data from 500 local U.S. government websites. Organizational structure, including technological and organizational capacity, is a determinant shared by all dimensions of open government. Furthermore, accessibility is affected by a mixture of an innovative and participative culture and external pressures. A flexible and innovative culture positively relates to higher levels of transparency, whereas capacity is a strong predictor of adopting participatory features. The main conclusion is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to fostering the three dimensions of open government, as each dimension is subject to a unique combination of determinants.
This article synthesizes the cross-disciplinary literature on government transparency. It systematically reviews research addressing the topic of government transparency published between 1990 and 2015. The review used 187 studies to assess three questions: (1) what forms of transparency has the literature identified?; (2) what outcomes does the literature attribute to transparency?; and (3) how successful is transparency in achieving those goals? In addressing these questions, we reviewed six interrelated types of transparency and nine governance and citizen related outcomes of transparency. Based upon the findings of the analysis, we outline an agenda for future research on government transparency and its effects, which calls for: more systematically investigating the ways in which contextual conditions shapes transparency outcomes, replicating studies with varying methodologies, investigating transparency in neglected countries, and paying greater attention to understudied claims of transparency such as decision-making and management.
Practitioner Points
• Government transparency is no cure-all and does not always have positive outcomes.
• Instead, transparency is effective in achieving certain outcomes, such as improving participation, financial management and reducing corruption.
• Transparency is less effective at engendering trust and legitimacy of government.
• Our analysis suggests government transparency ‘works’ under some conditions but not under others. What these conditions are needs further investigation.
A central question for programs that involve constituents in the coproduction of government services is: what motivates constituents to participate? This study compares two perspectives on this question: the traditional public-as-citizen model treats participation as a function of a general civic disposition that extends to many forms of civic and political participation (e.g. volunteering and voting); and we introduce the public-as-partner model, which argues that a given program might rely on any of the diverse array of human motivations, depending on the specific nature of participation required. We compare these using 311 systems, which provide a hotline and online tools for requesting nonemergency government services (e.g. graffiti removal), evaluating whether using 311 to contribute to neighborhood maintenance primarily reflects a civic disposition or is additionally motivated by a capacity for territoriality (i.e. identifying with and claiming responsibility for spaces), per the public-as-partner model. The study links three forms of information at the individual level for a sample of 311 users from Boston, Massachusetts (n = 722): objective reporting activity, derived from the 311 archive; a user survey including self-reports of civic activities and territorial motives; and voter registration records. Controlling for demographics and the contextual effects of home neighborhood, higher territorial motives predicted a greater likelihood of a person reporting any issues of public concern and reporting more issues over a broader geographical range in one’s home neighborhood (where >80% of reports are made). Civic activities and voting predicted a greater likelihood of reporting in nonhome neighborhoods (e.g. work). This dichotomy highlights the distinction between the two models in conceptualizing the motivations for participation in coproduction. The article explores how to extend this logic to the assessment of participation, outreach, and disparities in access across programs.
Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has shown that organizational trustworthiness is multidimensional, but the extant literature has not validated such measures in a public administration context. The proposed scale builds on and adapts an existing organizational trust scale to a public administration context. The ‘Citizen Trust in Government Organizations’ scale is validated using data from two different samples (total n = 991), resulting in a scale of nine items measuring three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity. This scale can be used by other researchers and is valuable to gain a more specific and multi-dimensional understanding of trust in government organizations.
Points for practitioners
A major problem for government organizations worldwide is the lack of perceived trustworthiness by the public. To tackle this problem, a way to measure it is needed, but at the moment there are only generic measures to assert perceived trustworthiness in a government organization. This article presents a first validation and incorporates three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and honesty. Practitioners can use this scale and adapt to their relevant local context to identify specific trustworthiness problems.
Reputation-seeking can explain some decisions of U.S. federal agencies. However, it has remained unclear whether it could be used in the European context where agencies have proliferated in national and regional governance in the past few decades. This article shows that reputation-seeking can occur at autonomous agencies in the European context. A unique participant-observational study of an international public health agency acting in response to the 2009 H1N1 “swine” influenza pandemic provides bases for this conclusion. It adds empirical support for the proposition using real-time observations of and in-depth interviews on the agency’s decision-making processes.
Initiatives to boost public trust of government often rely on better reporting of the efforts and accomplishments of government agencies. But if citizens disbelieve the performance reports of agencies, especially information about good performance, then these initiatives may be do little to enhance trust. We ask the following questions: Do citizens find performance information from government agencies to be credible, or do they trust more in independent sources? Do they believe some agencies more than others? And does credibility of the agency itself as a source depend on the level of performance that is being reported? To address these questions, we designed an experiment to test the credibility of a customer satisfaction index for two U.S. federal agencies, with random allocation of the specific agency (one politically less attractive, the other more so), the source of the index (the federal agency itself or an independent rating firm), as well as the level of performance reported in the index. Results from an online sample of nearly 600 U.S. adults show that credibility is lower for the politically less attractive agency and that citizens are especially doubtful about good performance reported by the government agency itself (as opposed to the independent rating firm). These results suggest that independent sources can boost credibility when reporting good news about government performance.
Management decisions are considered important for the performance of public organizations, but how does information about performance influence management decision-making? Developed from Simon's notion of bounded rationality, the behavioral model of performance-based learning suggests that managers adjust their understanding of organizational problems, search for information, and consider initiating change when their organization performs below aspirations. In this paper, we offer experimental evidence of how performance information affects the attitudes and decision-making of public managers. We leverage two experiments conducted among managers in public education. Study 1 uses a question-order experiment to prime only treated respondents to consider performance, whereas study 2 uses treatments with high- and low-performance signals. We find that low performance affects problem focus but not managers' intention to conduct innovative search. We also find that low-performance signals increase preferences for immediate performance-oriented changes but not for other types of changes. We discuss the implications for management decision-making.
Evidence for Practice
• Performance information holds the potential to generate organizational learning and inform public managers' decisions about important problems, priorities, and organizational change.
• Public managers become more focused on direct performance-oriented changes when performance is low, whereas high performance lets them engage in other types of changes.
• Performance information alone does not ensure that public managers are focused on generating innovative solutions to performance problems.
Open government data has led to public policy innovation in pursuit of various expected benefits. One of the intended goals of open data innovation to improve transparency and accountability. However, our current understanding of open data innovation and its ability to generate transparency and accountability is limited, particularly with regard to empirical evidence. In this paper, we describe how a state agency redesigned its organizational processes around visualization tools and how such efforts helped bridge the transparency-accountability gap by enhancing the understandability and usability of open government data. We conclude that open data innovation does not stop with the adoption of an open data policy, but rather involves an ongoing cycle of improvements through which the organization responds to its various stakeholders' use of open data, thereby increasing usefulness of those datasets and, subsequently, improving overall accountability.
Citizen-government interactions through performance information have recently gained attention in public administration. To enhance these interactions, governments utilize interactive information presentations to deliver information, in the hope of allowing citizens to make informed decisions. However, there is little empirical evidence on whether the implementation of interactive presentational formats helps citizens to make more accurate decisions. Drawing on information processing and cognitive fit theories, we argue that citizens make more accurate decisions using an interactive information presentation, which reduces the complexity of the task and boosts their cognition. Using a survey experiment, we test the effect of interactive presentation of information on the accuracy of citizens’ decisions. Our findings show that an interactive information presentation, as compared to a static one, increases the accuracy of their decisions. The results suggest that it is essential for governments not only to publish performance information, but also to consider the way in which information is presented, so they can make it more useful to citizens.
Despite the increasing number of publications on organizational reputation in the public administration throughout the last two decades, no systematic review has been conducted to synthesize the current state of the literature. This article contributes to this issue by bringing together empirical and theoretical academic research—119 articles and seven books—to analyze five critical aspects of this scholarship: conceptualization, types implemented, antecedents, outcomes, and multidimensionality. This work provides an overview of the field while identifying five critical areas for further research, including reputational audiences, public leaders’ impact on reputation, development of typologies based on the characteristics of reputation, the use of standardized methods to conduct more cross‐country studies, and research on a wider variety of cultural and organizational contexts.
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Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational histories increase the likelihood of receiving positive or negative newspaper coverage. Our findings are based on an extensive coding of 11,041 newspaper articles over a 10-year period in Denmark and Flanders (Belgium) regarding 40 agencies. We introduce a measure of reputational history from communication studies. The analysis identifies that both negative and positive reputational histories are related to the valence of newspaper coverage, suggesting that the past reputations of agencies are part of the cognitive basis upon which audiences form reputational judgment.
This article examines the institutional factors that influence the implementation of open data platforms in U.S. cities. Public management scholarship has argued that governance can be transformed by new information technologies that improve transparency and engagement, reduce administrative costs, and support performance management systems. However, this argument ignores key risks for administrators, as well as institutional and political obstacles that can thwart implementation. This article uses hierarchical negative binomial regression to analyze the organizational and institutional features influencing implementation in more than 1,500 departments across 60 cities. Department type and administrative capacity are strongly associated with the number of open data files available, while city‐level institutional characteristics and administrative capacity are not significant factors. Municipal demographics are also identified as a factor, suggesting a potential demand‐side influence from wealthy and technologically proficient residents.
Evidence for Practice
• The implementation of open data policies benefits from targeted approaches at the department level rather than uniform, citywide objectives or requirements.
• City executive‐level positions such as chief data or information officers are not necessarily associated with successful implementation, measured by the number of open data files made available.
• Open data implementation involves additional administrative responsibilities and labor at the department level, so city administrators looking to expand the number and variety of data sets available through their open data platforms should devote time and resources to working directly with departments to facilitate and encourage data sharing.
• Administrators looking to expand the number and variety of data sets available through their open data platforms should consider the costs associated with investing in increasing individual departments’ abilities to balance the additional administrative responsibilities and labor involved.
Despite the widespread implementation of performance management in public organizations, we know little about how contextual factors influence frontline employees’ perceptions of performance information. This study contributes to the literature by developing and empirically testing hypotheses stating that the source of the performance information matters to frontline employees’ perceptions and willingness to use performance information for learning purposes. We test the hypotheses in a survey experiment including 1926 public high school teachers in Denmark. The findings show that frontline employees exposed to performance information from vertical sources (the management) rather than from horizontal sources (colleagues in learning forums or the employees themselves) are less likely to perceive performance information as relevant and useful, and less willing to use the information for learning activities. The findings have important policy implications for the design of performance management in public organizations.
Entering the 2000s, the open government movement along with open data policy gradually has taken over NPM, a long-standing global government reform for more than two decades. Despite the distinctive characteristics of recent open government initiative, it is arguably considered to be an extension of the conventional open government movement for right-to-know represented by the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 in the U.S. However, we argue new open government is different from old open government in terms of four dimensions: policy focus, nature of information, primary value, and role of citizens. New open government initiatives have shifted their policy focus from simple right-to-know to open data; the nature of information from traditional paper-based forms of information to machine-readable and reusable data; primary values from transparency to citizen participation and networked collaborative governance; and role of citizens from passive informed and service recipients to active co-producers of public services and users of open data. These points are specifically illustrated in this paper with selected open government initiatives undertaken by the Korean government.
As the scourge of “fake news” continues to plague our information environment, attention has turned toward devising automated solutions for detecting problematic online content. But, in order to build reliable algorithms for flagging “fake news,” we will need to go beyond broad definitions of the concept and identify distinguishing features that are specific enough for machine learning. With this objective in mind, we conducted an explication of “fake news” that, as a concept, has ballooned to include more than simply false information, with partisans weaponizing it to cast aspersions on the veracity of claims made by those who are politically opposed to them. We identify seven different types of online content under the label of “fake news” (false news, polarized content, satire, misreporting, commentary, persuasive information, and citizen journalism) and contrast them with “real news” by introducing a taxonomy of operational indicators in four domains—message, source, structure, and network—that together can help disambiguate the nature of online news content.
News—real or fake—is now abundant on social media. News posts on social media focus users’ attention on the headlines, but does it matter who wrote the article? We investigate whether changing the presentation format to highlight the source of the article affects its believability and how social media users choose to engage with it. We conducted two experiments and found that nudging users to think about who wrote the article influenced the extent to which they believed it. The presentation format of highlighting the source had a main effect; it made users more skeptical of all articles, regardless of the source’s credibility. For unknown sources, low source ratings had a direct effect on believability. Believability, in turn, influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment, and share). We also found confirmation bias to be rampant: users were more likely to believe articles that aligned with their beliefs, over and above the effects of other factors.
Citizen-generated open data is the data that individuals consciously generate and that are openly available for use in the public domain. The promise of citizen-generated data is that it generates a basis for public governance. We conducted an explorative comparative case study research of 25 cases in different countries to enhance our understanding of this multi-actor collaboration and mapped the variation in (1) citizen motivations to generate data, (2) the organization of data intermediaries and (3) influence on public governance. We found that citizen-generated data can indeed provide better information for public governance but, at the same time, citizen-generated data can also be used to challenge current positions and power structures. The contribution of citizen-generated data to public governance should thus be understood in terms of both collaboration and contestation.
The question of what is "good" or "poor" performance is difficult to answer without applying a reference point - a standard for comparison. Citizens' evaluation of performance information will, therefore, tend to be guided by reference points. We test how reference points alter citizens' evaluation of organizational performance. In this article, drawing on Herbert Simon, we test how citizens use historical (internal) and social (external) reference points when making relative comparisons: how important is current performance relative to past performance? And how important is current performance relative to the performance of other organizations? Two experiments are embedded within a large nationally representative sample of citizens (n = 3,443). The experiments assign historical and social reference points for performance data on education and unemployment to citizens. We find that citizens' performance evaluation is fundamentally a relative process. Interestingly, we show that social reference points are almost twice as important in citizens' evaluations as historical reference points. We find some evidence of a negativity bias in citizens' relative evaluations. The strong social reference point effects have implications for studying citizens' response to performance and how managers can frame and manipulate external performance data. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Public Management Research Association. All rights reserved.
Bureaucratic reputation has been defined as a set of beliefs about a public organization’s capacities, roles, and obligations that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences (Carpenter, 2010). Although one of the most important audiences in a democracy is the citizenry, very little empirical investigation has looked at citizens’ beliefs about specific government agencies and what individual or contextual factors influence these beliefs. To examine this question, this study analyzes data from a unique 2013 Pew Political Survey that represents the responses of 1500 US citizens on the reputations of 12 federal agencies. Results demonstrate that citizens view the reputations of some agencies (such as the CDC and NASA) much more favorably than other agencies (such as the IRS and the Department of Education). In regression analyses, findings suggest that the reputation of federal agencies varies according to citizens’ general level of trust in government and their political ideology, but that demographic, socioeconomic and regional differences also shape reputation judgments. These findings provide some preliminary empirical understanding of the reputation of government agencies in the eyes of the citizenry and may have implications for agencies seeking to manage their relationship with the public.
Points for practitioners
Bureaucratic reputation has important implications for public administrators because of its influence on a government agency’s autonomy, power, and legitimacy. Our study examines the reputations of 12 US federal government agencies and identifies individual and contextual determinants of citizens’ reputation ratings. We demonstrate that reputations differ between agencies and that certain factors – especially political ideology and trust in government – shape how the public views an agency’s reputation. These findings can help practitioners understand better how to strategically manage their agency’s reputation given an increasingly critical citizenry.
This article addresses important questions about the complex construct of underlying performance information use: public service performance. A between-subjects experimental vignette methodology was implemented to answer questions about the effects of emphasizing different dimensions of performance and the sources and types of performance information among internal and external stakeholders in two service arenas (secondary education and solid waste management) in Hong Kong. The findings indicate common attitudes and agreement across stakeholder groups and services on the merits of archival and external data types. Other results vary by service and between stakeholder groups. The effects of information about effectiveness can depend on its combination with information about efficiency or equity. This complexity needs to be considered when designing information communication to different stakeholder groups.
Online communities have become an important source for knowledge and new ideas. However, little is known about how to create a compelling virtual experience to inspire individuals to make novel contributions. This examination is crucial as participants' time and attention have become increasingly scarce resources in an ever more crowded online space. Drawing from the motivation through job design theory, we develop and test a research framework to examine how motivation can be influenced or triggered by competition design characteristics to drive creativity in crowdsourcing communities. Specifically, we investigate the importance of task and knowledge design dimensions in eliciting levels of motivation leading to creative efforts. Additionally, we consider the mediating influence of trust in driving knowledge contribution behaviour. Our hypothesising suggests that trust in the hosting platform reduces uncertainty and fosters knowledge exchange. Based on an empirical study of Kaggle's data scientists community, it reveals that intrinsic motivation exerts a strong effect on participation intention, which in turn positively impacts participant's creative efforts. Highly autonomous competitions with special emphasis on problem solving that require solvers to perform a variety of tasks will further challenge contestants to apply their abilities and skills leading to greater enjoyment and sense of competence. Our findings provide important implications for Web platform managers for the successful management of crowdsourcing communities.
Technological capabilities and features of the Internet and World Wide Web have prompted concerns about the verity of online information, the credibility of new media, and the new responsibilities placed on media consumers. Reflecting these concerns, scholars have shown a renewed interest in the credibility of sources, their messages, and the media that carry them. Nonetheless, researchers who are currently reengaging the issue of information credibility have yet to take full advantage of the rich heritage left by credibility research conducted over the last half century. The primary aim of this chapter is to show how past research can inform present attempts to understand credibility in the new media environment, focusing particularly on Web-based information. Toward that end, this chapter reviews, synthesizes, and integrates the substantial literature on source, message, and media credibility; addresses issues of credibility conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement; suggests strategies to ...
The general principle of division of labor creates the potential to achieve technical (internal) and allocative (external) efficiency. This lies at the heart of a discussion on autonomous agencies and contract management. To be beneficial, a division of labor should result in specialization, and consequently there should be a subsequent step of coordination. Whether this coordination is guaranteed in the market system, in organizations, or in a mix of both, and what kind of information should be used to ensure satisfactory coordination to obtain the full yield of specialization and division of labor, is a major question.
Social media are invaluable sources of information during organizational crises. Although recent research confirms this fundamental role in crisis communication, this article is aimed at deepening the understanding about the role of the source of information in this socially mediated era by comparing the organization and the employee as communicators. As social media lack traditional gatekeeping processes, dynamics of both source and content credibility are assessed. The findings, based on an experimental design, advocate that judgments of organizational reputation are not only dependent on the crisis-response strategy, but also depend on the source and perceptions of source and content credibility. 2015
This study examines the role of reputation on decision making under ambiguity. Drawing on social cognition and behavioral theories, we propose that a firm's reputation exerts dual pressures on its decision making under ambiguity. On the one hand, a firm's reputation increases its aspirations for future performance and promotes its engagement in risky strategies to achieve them. On the other hand, preserving the already established reputation requires a firm to deliver consistent performance over time, which promotes greater use of risk reduction strategies. Our analyses of the U.S. venture capital firms' investments in the clean energy sector from 1990 to 2008 demonstrate that while reputable firms are more likely to invest in the emerging sector, they also employ risk reduction strategies more extensively. The sector's legitimation further influences these firms' investment decisions both directly and through its interaction with firm reputation.