When Will Public Officials Listen? A Vignette Experiment on the Effects of Input Legitimacy on Public Officials’ Willingness to Use Public Participation

Abstract

Public officials can be reluctant to use citizens’ input in decision‐making, especially when turnout is low and participants are unrepresentative of the wider population. Using Fritz Scharpf's democratic legitimacy approach, the authors conducted a survey‐based vignette experiment to examine how the input legitimacy of participatory processes affects (1) public officials’ willingness to use public participation in administrative decision‐making, (2) their assessment of the quality of the policy decision, and (3) their anticipation of popular support for the policy outcome. The study shows that turnout and participants’ representativeness have a positive and significant effect on public officials’ attitudes toward public participation. Specifically, participants’ representativeness influences public officials’ willingness to use citizens’ inputs more than turnout.

How Public Managers Make Tradeoffs Regarding Lives: Evidence From a Flood Planning Survey Experiment

“…Recent studies provide empirical support for the external validity of vignette-based choice experiments, showing that the decisions made in response to the survey are consistent with real-world decisions (Evans et al, 2015; Hainmueller et al, 2015; Migchelbrink & Van de Walle, 2020). Moreover, analyzing a decision relevant to managers’ work improves this external validity by allowing us to study managers in their environment rather surveying college students or the general population.…”

“…The disadvantage of the approach is that each manager may draw on their own experience in answering the question. While some vignette experiments using public managers have focused on a single city to mitigate this potential problem (e.g., Migchelbrink & Van de Walle, 2020), we aim for greater external validity by surveying managers from different jurisdictions. This recognizes that managers from large, rich counties may operate under different constraints than managers from small, modestly resourced counties.…”

Different Processes, Different Outcomes? Assessing the Individual‐Level Impacts of Public Participation

“…For instance, scholars may want to compare the efficacy of policy outputs generated from different participatory processes, in terms of their feasibility, quality, effectiveness, and impacts on desired policy outcomes. Lastly, an exploration of public administrators' roles, perceptions, and attitudes regarding direct public participation is an important future research area (e.g., Migchelbrink and Van de Walle 2020). Public participation has become a key component of the every day work of government agencies, and public administrators play critical roles in designing, managing, implementing, and evaluating various participatory processes.…”

Governance: Struggle and Strife—Or Synergy and Success—In the Trans‐COVID Era

“…As I reflect on the content of PAR and other public administration journals over the past few years, it is clear that the emphasis is on trans‐organizational cooperation, and involvement of stakeholders and citizens in government has shown tremendous potential. We have published numerous articles that explore collaboration (Douglas and Ansell 2021; Huang 2020; Lindsay et al 2021; Min, Lee, and Yang 2020; Mosley and Jarpe 2019; Stadtler and Karakulak 2020; Van der Wal 2020), coproduction (Cheng 2019; Gazley, LaFontant, and Cheng 2020; Steen and Brandsen 2020; Voorberg et al 2018 and Xu and Tang 2020), partnership (Grizzle, Goodin, and Robinson 2020; Jung, Malatesta, and LaLonde 2018; Tan and Zhao 2019), participation (Ingrams and Schachter 2019; Migchelbrink and Van de Walle 2020; Moon 2020; Muthomi and Thurmaier 2021; Rutherford, McDonnell and Hogg 2021; van den Berg et al 2020), and other approaches to solving problems outside the structural framework of government. Electronic media can motivate and mobilize citizens around ideas; it can create the focus needed for policy entrepreneurs to intervene.…”