How State Capacity Influences Citizen Satisfaction with Public Services

• In Event: Poster Session: Experiments in Political Behavior & Public Administration & Canadian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: The Emerging Issues in the Modern Administrative State

Abstract

How does state capacity affect citizen satisfaction with public services? The prominent paradigm in public administration is the expectancy-disconfirmation model (EDM) to examine how internal (i.e., expectation and performance of public services) and external factors (i.e., social capital and administrative autonomy) influence service satisfaction outcomes (Song et al., 2021; Van Ryzin, 2004; Zhang et al., 2021). However, little research has theorized and empirically examined the impacts of state capacity contexts on citizens’ satisfaction with public services. State capacity denotes government’ ability to enforce their will by monitoring and steering citizens’ behavior (Migdal, 1988). As state capacity is often viewed as an important determinant of public services, we propose two competing hypotheses explaining the relationship between state capacity and citizen satisfaction: the facilitating effect hypothesis and the inhibiting effect hypothesis. On the one hand, weak state capacity results in citizens holding low expectations of the availability and quality of services their government can provide, and therefore promoting public service satisfaction among citizens. On the other hand, citizens’ access to high-performing public services increases with the strong state capacity, generating high citizen satisfaction.

We test our theoretical hypotheses using an original nationwide survey, the 2019 China Social Governance Survey (CSGS), combined with street office locations of 4941 respondents in 127 counties, 100 cities in 26 provinces. We measure each respondent’s satisfaction with public service provided by local governments, including education, pension, employment, medical, health, and housing. State capacity is measured with respondents’ evaluation of right enforcement justice, responsiveness to citizens, law enforcement capacity, and transparency. Our identification strategy exploits exogenous variations in the geographic distance because prominent arguments hold that states’ geography limits state capacity.

To overcome the problem of endogeneity, we collect geographic data on travel times between respondents to their regional capitals and economic centers on the shortest path as instrumental variables for sub-national state capacity. The study confirms the facilitating effect hypothesis: on average, citizens living in regions with a high level of state capacity report significantly higher satisfaction with government services. These findings are robust to a range of additional tests, including adding additional pre- existing socio- economic and demographic factors, using different distance measures, conducting multiple imputations for missing data, and applying various post-stratification weighting adjustments for sample representativeness.

This article contributes to several strands of literature. First, moving the literature beyond the dominance of internal determinants in the EDM, this study extends knowledge on citizen satisfaction exploring state capacity as a local context. Second, we put forth a theory of the mechanisms through which state capacity may influence citizen satisfaction with public service, focusing particularly on the Chinese case. Third, our study sheds new light on our understanding of the formation of citizen satisfaction with multiple services, rather than public services in general or satisfaction with individual services. Moreover, although there are some survey experimental efforts, causal inference research remains limited due to a lack of representative data. This study uses fine-grained national survey data and instrumental approaches, which provides consistent estimates with much finer geographic resolution than most related work.

Authors

• Juan Du, East China Normal University

• Xufeng Zhu, Tsinghua University