Early work on municipal service-quality assessment recommended multiple measures of performance from both providers and users. Citizen satisfaction surveys have rivaled their more quantitative counterpart, administrative performance measures, in adoption, but the implication of survey results for action is not well understood by managers or scholars. To achieve meaningfully integrated multiple measures of service quality, we need to explore the dimensions of citizen satisfaction and review patterns of satisfaction across localities. We also need to understand the relationship between administrative performance measures and citizen perceptions. This crosssectional analysis of municipal citizen satisfaction and performance benchmark data suggests that citizen satisfaction survey results are useful to managers in conjunction with performance-measurement programs as part of a multiple-indicator approach to evaluating municipal service quality. However, understanding citizen perceptions requires a different perspective than that applied to administrative service performance measurement.

The Dilemma of the Unsatisfied Customer in a Market Model of Public AdministrationThe relationship between administrative service performance and citizen satisfaction has been assumed, but not demonstrated, in the application of market models to public service delivery. Although the citizen satisfaction literature cautions that the link between objective and subjective measures of service quality is tenuous at best, public-sector professional organizations define a managerial focus on objective measures of service performance as accountability to citizens for outcomes. What if we're wrong?

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The most recent reform in public service delivery is predicated on an assumption that the kinds of activities that managers can measure are the dimensions of service that citizens value. The link between administrative performance measures and citizen satisfaction with services has been tested within cities but not among cities, owing to data comparability difficulties. This test for a relationship between police and fire service performance and citizen satisfaction with police and fire services across 50 localities does not reveal the result predicted in the public management literature. Some implications and recommendations for future specifications of the relationship are offered in conclusion.

There is currently a strong focus on alternative service delivery models and improved government service in the urban and public administration fields. A key aspect of this has been the institutionalization of performance measurement and benchmarking as core tools necessary to reinvent government and make agencies run like businesses. However, the focus on performance measurement has been limited to evaluations of inputs and outputs. Advocates have not successfully tackled the more difficult challenge of integrating good internal measures with service outcomes, which can best be measured by soliciting feedback from the customer through citizen surveys. In this article, we examine 96 neighborhoods across 12 cities and counties and find significant variation in the distribution of service satisfaction outcomes. We argue that such neighborhood-level feedback is useful and illustrates the importance to administrators of disaggregating traditional performance measures to the same neighborhood level to target scare resources more effectively where needed. The mechanisms for gauging success of urban service delivery have changed over the past century, but the idea that citizens can and should hold their city government accountable for service outcomes has not. The Progressives demanded representational accountability and reformed urban political systems to achieve it. Evidence of success could be found in the councilmanager form of government, at-large representation, and nonpartisan elections. About midcentury, accountability for service outcomes involved the notion of equality, especially in the distribution of urban services and investment of public resources with regard to race and income. Evidence of reform included bureaucratic decision rules that embodied ethical and profes-