Citizens’ evaluations of government services form a crucial democratic accountability feedback mechanism. Yet, accumulated public administration research questions the ability of citizens to form accurate judgments about public services and update them due to cognitive mechanisms of bias. In particular, studies building on political science works suggest that citizens’ evaluations may be colored by their partisanship, and the match/mismatch with the responsible government in power (“partisan bias”). These studies suggest that partisan bias is expected to be especially pronounced under conditions of political polarization as well as under clarity of functional responsibility. Our study aims to investigate how partisan bias in citizens’ evaluations of public services is manifested in such conditions. We explore the most likely case of Israel, characterized by centralized services and highly polarized society. We focus on two government changes in Israel in 2021 (Bennet-Lapid coalition) and 2022 (Netanyahu coalition). To test the theory, we employ a difference-in-difference design. We analyze citizens’ evaluations of four public services and compare the evaluations of electoral winners and losers before and after government changes. We report two studies within this case, based on separate repeated cross-sectional survey datasets. In study 1, we analyze a large survey data with six data points between 2020-2023 (analytical sample of circa 4,500 observations), we collected via an opt-in online panel. These analyses show substantial changes among both winners and losers after the government changes, indicative of partisan bias. Yet, these effects may be inflated due to “partisan cheerleading” effect as well as the overrepresentation of strong partisans in voluntary survey panels. In study 2, we address these concerns and supplement our analyses with high-quality citizen data from the administrative “2021 social survey” (N=7,400), distributed by the Israeli CBS. As these surveys do not directly account for partisanship, we rely on a partisanship classification prediction model as a proxy. We find evidence for partisan bias in some service domains, yet the interaction effects are much weaker.

Literature assumes that an attractive, organizational mission, or high level of mission valence, positively influences prospective employees (Moynihan & Pandey, 2005; Wright & Pandey, 2010; Wright & Pandey, 2011). As a result, public organizations have been pushed to communicate mission statements that describe their organization’s purpose (Desmidt et al., 2011; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Paarlberg & Lavigna, 2010). However, insights on the positive impact of mission statements on mission valence and organizational attributes, and how mission statements should be rhetorically designed to facilitate this effect, are rather scarce (Desmidt, 2016; Wright et al., 2012).

Building on signaling theory (e.g., Cable & Turban, 2003; Drover et al., 2018) and dual cognitive processing theory (Sloman, 2014), this study investigates the positive impact of the use of imagery language in mission statements on the perceived organizational attractiveness by prospective employees. The underlying motivational mechanism is analyzed by including person-organization fit (POF) and mission valence as mediators.

A randomized survey experiment including data from 703 Flemish (Dutch-speaking region in Belgium) final-year university students, was used to validate the formulated hypotheses. Participants were asked to read a fictional job advertisement (control group = no imagery language in mission statement, and treatment group = use of imagery language in mission statement) and, consequently, assess POF, mission valence and organizational attractiveness.

The results show that the use of imagery language in mission statements initiates an underlying motivational process in which POF and mission valence are impacted and associated with higher levels of organizational attractiveness. This suggests imagery language acts as a nudging technique positively impacting prospective employees’ organizational perceptions and intended behavior (Farrow et al., 2023). It thus helps public organizations to develop more effective job advertisements and eventually strengthens their capability to attract prospective employees in the War for Talent (Fatfouta, 2021; Sievert et al., 2022).

Welfare states offer citizens myriads of lived experiences with public services. As Esping- Andersen (1990, p. 141) concluded decades ago, “The welfare state is becoming deeply embedded in the everyday experience of virtually every citizen. Our personal life is structured by the welfare state...”. Some encounters are life-changing, marking a shift in citizens’ life trajectories; like being hospitalized, arrested by the police, or receiving unemployment benefits. Other encounters are linked naturally to citizens’ life cycles, such as daycare, primary education, and nursing homes. Common for all, they offer rich lived experiences from day-to-day exposure to public organizations and the street-level bureaucrats that staff them. We study the effect of citizens’ lived experience with the public sector. While day-today experiences are intuitively consequential, evidence on public service attitudes focuses on information provision rather than information obtained through personal exposure. We study lived experience with elementary schools: one of the most important, intense, and prolonged public sector exposures. By default, Danish pupils enroll in August in the year they turn six. We sample two cohorts of parents to children born around December 31 (N=5,743; 74% of Danish schools) and compare attitudes around the school enrollment discontinuity. Personal experience increases satisfaction with one’s district school and elementary schools in general (about 0.3 SDs). We also find robust and large effects on parents’ perceived contribution of teachers and the responsibility of pupils, parents, and teachers (around 0.3-0.4 SDs). We conclude that using a public service reveals new layers of governance for citizens which for outsiders often seems like just another part of the submerged state. Behavioral public administration has tended to focus on external source of information like news or numbers for the inferences citizens make about public services. We add the causal importance of lived experiences for citizens’ basic inferences about services.

Research has examined many behavioural aspects of reporting government performance, including reporting numerical measures of performance to citizens as a way of enhancing government accountability (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017; Tummers et al., 2016). However, surprisingly little research has directly asked citizens what they want from reports containing such measures. This is an important oversight because citizens have in general been found to be reluctant to spend time becoming informed about policies which can cause the implementation of performance reporting systems to fail. We identify citizens’ preferences for different attributes of performance reports that previous behavioural research suggests should be relevant to them. Using an online sample of 1,500 respondents, we conduct discrete choice experiments to assess citizens’ preferences for performance reporting for a set of local government public services in England with different characteristics (waste recycling, environmental performance and social care). The findings will be available by August 2023 and will show citizens’ willingness to spend time on different aspects of performance reports. The findings will further explore interactions between citizens’ perceptions of actual performance and their preferences for reporting. The results will suggest new avenues of research about different features of performance reporting and how the design and implementation of performance reporting systems can be improved.

Grimmelikhuijsen, S., Jilke, S., Olsen, A. L., & Tummers, L. (2017). Behavioral public administration: Combining insights from public administration and psychology. Public Administration Review, 77(1), 45-56.

Tummers, L., Leth Olsen, A., Jilke, S., & Grimmelikhuijsen, S. G. (2016). Introduction to the virtual issue on behavioral public administration. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.