Conference Agenda

Democratic accountability rests on citizens’ ability to connect the outcomes of public policies to the responsibilities of the relevant governing bodies (Boyne et al. 2009. However, citizens often hold inaccurate beliefs about policy outcomes and have limited knowledge about which governing bodies are responsible for them (Achen and Bartels, 2017). These problems are compounded because citizens often exhibit biased processing of policy-relevant information, especially negativity bias (Lodge and Taber, 2013; James & Moseley, 2014; Olsen 2015).

In our study we ask to what extent do citizens learn about government outcomes and responsibilities through receiving performance information about policy outcomes? We further assess the extent that citizens’ learning entails negativity bias in their responses. We implement a pre-registered survey experimental design giving citizens true but noisy information about the ranked performance outcomes of eight local unitary city governments in England for three policy areas: local air quality, local road quality and local household waste recycling. This design enables us to give some participants positively valence information that their local government is performing better than others and some negatively valanced information that it is performing worse, but all from the same underlying ranked performance information. This method avoids difficulties from potential confounders in simple comparisons that give people performance information in high performing areas and compare the magnitude of reaction to those given information in low performing areas -because the areas differ in many respects not only in the performance information about them.

Using a Bayesian updating benchmark for comparison, we assess hypotheses that information about negative outcomes produces more belief updating, and more attribution of responsibility to local government, than positive information. We further assess if negativity bias is lower for citizens who voted for the incumbent party controlling the local government. The survey is planned for late spring 2025. The findings have implications for theory and practice of performance information in democratic accountability of government to citizens.

Achen, C. H., & Bartels, L. M. (2017). Democracy for realists: Why elections do not produce responsive government.

Boyne, G. A., James, O., John, P., & Petrovsky, N. (2009). Democracy and government performance: Holding incumbents accountable in English local governments. The Journal of Politics, 71(4), 1273-1284.

James, O., & Moseley, A. (2014). Does performance information about public services affect citizens’ perceptions, satisfaction and voice behaviour? Field experiments with absolute and relative performance information. Public administration, 92(2), 493-511.

Lodge, M., & Taber, C. S. (2013). The rationalizing voter. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Olsen, A. L. (2015). Citizen (dis)satisfaction: An experimental equivalence framing study. Public Administration Review, 75(3), 469–478.

Public service performance information is frequently used to try to influence the behaviour and views of citizens regarding public services. Gaining citizens’ attention is often assumed to make performance information impactful, but the role of attention as a mechanism of influencing citizens using performance information remains empirically underexplored. This study investigates attention as a driver of impact using an eye tracking experiment.

Participants were shown a series of performance reports on fictional schools in pairs and asked to evaluate one of the two schools positively or negatively. The experiment aimed to isolate the extent to which attention contributes to the impact of performance information.

Regression analysis results indicate that attention is not a key driver of the effects of performance information on citizens’ choices. Instead, the presence of comparisons was the main contributor to the choices made by participants, with specific forms of comparisons playing a more minor role.

This paper examines the relationship between religious affiliation and its influence on perceptions of federal government performance. It investigates whether religious affiliation or religiosity in the United States affects how individuals perceive federal government performance. Understanding this relationship may provide politicians and lawmakers with deeper insights into their constituencies, enabling more informed decisions about potential government actions. Our findings indicate that adherents of Islam are three times more likely to hold a strongly positive perception of federal government performance compared to atheist or agnostic respondents—no other religious group exhibited similar results. Other religions (e.g., Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Unitarianism) showed marginal statistical significance and a more positive perception, while “other – write-in” groups displayed a slightly more negative perception than non-religious groups. Christianity (including Catholicism, Protestantism, and other denominations) did not yield significant results. These findings may contribute to comparative research on religiosity and its effects on perceptions of federal government performance, public administration, and trust in government.

Cannabis remains one of the most debated substances, with a long and complex history intersecting culture, law, and social acceptance (Hannah et al., 2023). Discussions about its legitimacy continue, particularly whether it should remain illegal, be decriminalized, or fully legalized. This contextual embedding allows exploring the formation of individual legitimacy judgments, particularly relevant for public organizations (Bitektine and Haack, 2015; Rimkutė and Mazepus, 2025). We are interested in the role of government (through authorization) and society (through endorsement) in shaping individual legitimacy judgments about policies focused on recreational cannabis.

To do so, we carried out two conjoint experiments in the Netherlands (3,465 decisions; 385 respondents) and in the UK (3,375 decisions; 375 respondents) to investigate how these so-called validity cues affect citizens’ legitimacy judgments. As such, we can capture the simultaneous processing of authorization and endorsement in legitimacy judgment formation (Haack et al., 2021). Citizens were exposed to the two cues with varying valence. Each profile comprised authorization and endorsement at three levels with positive, neutral and negative valences (authorized/unauthorized – undecided/undecided- favorable/unfavorable). The findings highlight the relevance of congruence between authorization through government actors and endorsement through society in legitimizing recreational cannabis.

References

Bitektine, A. and Haack, P. (2015). 'The “Macro” and the “Micro” of Legitimacy: Toward a Multilevel Theory of the Legitimacy Process.' Academy of Management Review, 40, 49–75.

Haack, P., Schilke, O., and Zucker, L. (2021). 'Legitimacy Revisited: Disentangling Propriety, Validity, and Consensus.' Journal of Management Studies, 58, 749–781.

Hannah, A. L., Mallinson, D. J., and Azevedo, L. (2023). 'Maximizing social equity as a pillar of public administration: An examination of cannabis dispensary licensing in Pennsylvania.' Public Administration Review, 83, 144–162.

Rimkutė, D. and Mazepus, H. (2025). 'Citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of independent agencies: The effects of expertise‐based and reputation‐sourced authority.' Public Administration Review.