The Credibility of Government Performance Reporting

Ryzin, Gregg G. Van; Lavena, Cecilia F.

doi:10.2753/pmr1530-9576370104

Cited by 31 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…This lack of much difference between government versus non-government sources is consistent with the one previous experiment along similar lines (Van Ryzin & Lavena, 2013). Still, we designed our experiment to probe this previous finding more deeply by focusing on the federal government and using the ACSI, a reputable and independent firm, and thus expected to see more of a source main effect.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Incredibly Good Performance

James

Ryzin

2016

The American Review of Public Administration

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Incredibly Good Performance

James

Ryzin

2016

The American Review of Public Administration

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“…Clearly, the mere existence of performance data need not imply that politicians also take this into consideration. Politicians should be informed about the level of public sector performance-and believe this information to be relevant and credible (James and Van Ryzin 2017 ;Nielsen and Moynihan 2017 ;Van Ryzin and Lavena 2013). Performance information is generally provided through some form of communication, which "surrounds every policy implemented by bureaucrats" (Andersen and Jakobsen 2017 , 57).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Never Change a Winning Policy? Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms

Geys

Sørensen

2017

Public Administration Review

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Despite the increasing stress on performance in public sector organizations, there is still little empirical evidence on whether—and if so, how—politicians respond to performance information. This article addresses this research gap by linking registry statistics on school performance in Norway's 428 municipalities with data from an information experiment embedded in a survey of local politicians. Findings show that school performance bears only a weak relationship to politicians' preferences for resource‐related reforms, but it strongly affects preferences for governance‐related reforms, indicating the importance of accounting for heterogeneity across alternative types of (school) reforms. Moreover, local politicians are, on average, well informed about school performance. This reflects the force of local inhabitants' high information level on politicians' accountability.

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“…However, the legitimacy of intentionally framing rates to alter citizens' judgments is debatable. Attempts to manipulate rates in this way could undermine citizens' trust in official statistics, adding to the credibility problem of government performance (Van Ryzin & Lavena, 2013;. Relying on official statistical agencies, such as inspectorates and audit bodies, to decide the best framing of rates to report to the public certainly helps reduce the potential for political gaming and manipulation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The importance of ratio bias to public policy and administration has begun to be recognized (Pedersen, 2017) and, we argue, may matter for reporting government performance and, in turn, democratic accountability. Evidence suggests that government performance reporting in general can influence citizens' perceptions of outcomes and conditions in society (James, 2011;Larsen & Olsen, 2019;Van Ryzin & Lavena, 2013). Moreover, a range of biases have been detected in how users interact with performance information (Andersen & Hjortskov, 2015;James & Van Ryzin, 2016;2017;Olsen, 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

Rates and the judgment of government performance

James

Ryzin

2019

JBPA

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Many official statistics reported to the public appear in the form of rates, such as crimes or diseases per 100,000 people, with the choice of a base number (for example per 1,000,000, per 100,000, or per 1,000) remaining largely a matter of the choices or traditions of statistical agencies. Because prior studies have shown that people tend to judge the likelihood of an event based on the numerator alone (thus exhibiting denominator neglect), we hypothesize that ratio bias influences citizens’ perceptions of risks and conditions in society when interpreting real government statistics. To probe this hypothesis, we designed a pair of survey experiments in which a sample of US adults was randomly allocated to treatment groups receiving the same official statistics about violent crime (from the FBI) and infant mortality (from the CDC) but framed as rates with different base numbers (with an additional group receiving only the absolute number of events). We find some evidence of the expected ratio bias when violent crime is framed in terms of different base numbers, but the results for infant mortality were less consistent. For both violent crime and infant mortality, however, absolute numbers led to perceptions of the greatest risk and least favorable conditions, while individual rates (per person) led to perceptions of the least risk and the most favorable conditions. These findings suggest that citizens’ substantive judgments about risks and conditions in society may be influenced to some extent by the framing of rates by government statistical agencies when reporting official statistics to the public.

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The Credibility of Government Performance Reporting

Cited by 31 publications

References 23 publications

Incredibly Good Performance

Incredibly Good Performance

Never Change a Winning Policy? Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms

Rates and the judgment of government performance

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