Incredibly Good Performance

Abstract

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.

Citizens’ motivated reasoning about public performance: experimental findings from the US and Denmark

“…In other contexts, an independent source of performance information has been found to be an important way of overcoming potential skepticism about the information. For example, citizens may be skeptical when public organizations report their own good performance, and thus, independent non-governmental sources partially counter this problem (James and Van Ryzin 2017a). However, such independent sources may not be so effective in cases of deep-seated identity-based reasoning that resists this influence.…”

The emotive effect of government branding on citizens' trust and its boundaries: Does the personal relevance of the policy issue matter?

“…As for those who are located at the low end of that continuum, or ‘peripheral route’, persuasion may occur mainly through processes that require only a small amount of thinking, such as evaluative conditioning. Another prominent example for peripheral route processing is people's reliance on message source as a heuristic cue (James and Van Ryzin ). When people are located between the two ends of the continuum, a mixture of these persuasion processes will operate.…”

e-Government, Transparency & Reputation: An Empirical Study of Spanish Local Government

“…From these reviews, it is clear that reputation is moderated by the country in which the study was undertaken, the typology of parti-735 cipant stakeholders,and the measurement scale adopted. The measurement of reputation in non-profit organizations is still in an emergent stage with an absence of standardization, and the applicability of any given set of metrics is dependent on the specific 740 context in which the organization is operating (Busuioc & Lodge, 2017;James & Van Ryzin, 2015;Waeraas & Byrkjeflot, 2012). This can be observed in, inter alia, Ryan (2007), where a corporate reputation quotienta scale of 28 items grouped in six dimensionsis 745 adapted to measure local government reputation, in the proposal of Luoma-Aho (2008), which tests five factors to measure reputation in public organizations in Finland and in the work of Christensen and Lodge (2016) who propose a typology composed of six dimen-750 sions, which was then used to analyze how five European governments manage their reputations.…”