Everything Is Relative: How Citizens Form and Use Expectations in Evaluating Services

Abstract

In recent years, studies of citizen satisfaction have increasingly relied on the expectancy-disconfirmation model, which highlights the role that expectations play in driving citizen evaluations of government services. But most empirical studies within public administration of the relationship between expectations and satisfaction indicate that expectations have little-to-no net effect on satisfaction. We argue that these results may be largely driven by the weaknesses of existing measurement approaches and inattention in many studies to the distinction between two types of expectations: those about what should happen (normative expectations) versus those about what will happen (predictive expectations). Distinguishing between these two types of expectations is important because they are likely to have different—and perhaps even opposite—effects on satisfaction. We recruited 972 U.S. residents on MTurk to complete a survey vignette experiment and found that normative expectations are strongly (and negatively) related to satisfaction levels while predictive expectations are barely related to satisfaction at all. We also find that comparative performance information generally has a much stronger effect on predictive expectations than on normative expectations. These findings suggest that theories of satisfaction should more consistently distinguish between different types of expectations. Our results also leave us somewhat optimistic about the ability of ordinary residents to follow a reasonable process when assigning normative meaning to performance information.

The Expectancy‐Disconfirmation Model and Citizen Satisfaction with Public Services: A Meta‐analysis and an Agenda for Best Practice

“…Hjortskov (2020) provides evidence that normative expectations are the most fundamental and important types of expectations among citizens. Most recently, Favero and Kim (2020) have also provided evidence that normative expectations have a stronger relationship with satisfaction. As Hjortskov (2016) argues, stable normative expectations can be seen as the standard or yardstick for the empirical expectations and this intersection between the two should be considered when conceptualizing expectations.…”

Your Money, Your Life, or Your Freedom? A Discrete‐Choice Experiment on Trade‐Offs During a Public Health Crisis

“…However, subjects in our experiment tended to me more educated than in the general population, where 62 percent hold a high school diploma or higher degree. In general, our sampling procedures share the same limitations that are common to most web surveys that use online panels of self-selected respondents, such as MTurk samples (e.g., Favero and Kim 2020). However, concerns about the representativeness of such samples are mitigated by evidence showing few noticeable disparities relative to other types of samples (e.g., Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz 2012).…”

To consent, or not to consent? The publicness effect on citizens’ willingness to grant access to personal data in the face of a health crisis

“…However, subjects in our experiment tend to be more educated than in the general population, where 62 per cent hold a high school diploma or higher degree. In general, our sampling procedures share the same limitations that are common to most web surveys that use online panels of self-selected respondents, such as MTurk samples (e.g., Favero & Kim, 2020) or samples of university affiliated individuals (e.g., . However, concerns about the representativeness of such samples are mitigated by evidence showing few noticeable disparities relative to other types of samples (e.g., Berinsky et al, 2012).…”