We examine the relationship between a range of New Public Management (NPM) practices and citizens' perceptions of service efficiency, responsiveness, equity and effectiveness in English local governments. We find that public-private relationships have a negative relationship with citizens'...

Is there evidence for the emergence of ‘two-track’ public services, where the wealthiest, best informed and most assertive customers get the best quality service? In this paper, we use public opinion data of citizen complaint behavior from 2000 and 2004 towards services of general interest...

Public opinion does not fall out of the sky. What passes for public opinion in the European Union is largely the answers of its citizens to questions posed in surveys commissioned and controlled by the European Commission. This paper presents the first systematic mapping of the topics and...

The chapters in this book on new steering instruments in pubic management have all in some way focused on new steering instruments in the public sector, or on how governments, often in collaboration with other actors, attempt to achieve integrated results and broad social outcomes. The trend...

New Public Management has been around for a quarter of a century in European public sectors, yet despite the movement’s emphasis on indicators and evidence, there have been surprisingly few encompassing evaluations. In this paper, we provide an overview of academic evaluation and impact...

Policy makers frequently invoked restoring the public sector’s legitimacy as one of the main motivations for public sector reform in the 1980s and ‘90s. Low or declining public trust in government and a decline of the public sector’s legitimacy (perceived or real) became a central...

The public administration and public services have always taken a marginal place in the political scientists’ behavioural research. Public administration students on the other hand tend to focus on political and administrative elites and institutions, and largely ignored citizens in...

We use data from the World Values Survey to describe and compare levels of confidence in the civil service in a series of countries, and study determinants of this confidence. Instead of focusing on citizen satisfaction with specific public services in a specific country, we analyze citizens’...