Citizen Ratings of Public and Private Service Quality: A Comparative Perspective

Currently there is considerable interest in quality and customer service in both business and government, as total quality management philosophy and practices (Deming, 1982; Scherkenback, 1986) have become widespread in the private sector and are making substantial inroads in the public sector (Krone, 1991; Milakovich, 1992; Hyde, 1992). With respect to the public sector, however, the move toward quality comes at a low point in the popular impression of the efficacy of government and the public service. In its widely heralded report, the Volcker Commission voiced alarming concern with public perceptions of corruption, waste, and ineffectiveness in government. The commission warned that this general distrust undermines the public service and in the long run could jeopardize the democratic process itself (National Commission on the Public Service, 1989, pp. 12-13). Indeed, conventional wisdom seems to take for granted that the private sector is far superior to the public sector in terms of overall performance. Downs and Larkey (1986) begin the preface to their tract on efficiency in government by stating: "If you are like most Americans, you believe that governments are inherently inefficient.... You believe that there should be less government and that what remains should be run as if it were a private business" (p. v). Although their subsequent analysis finds that governments are more efficient and businesses less efficient than popularly believed, the book's opening premise is that public services are generally not highly regarded. It often appears that the perceived performance gap between the public and private sectors pertains to both quality and customer service as well as the efficiency of service delivery. Joseph Sensenbrenner, a former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, says, "Increasingly, people don't believe that government knows how to help or wants to bother. They find concepts like |total quality,' |customer driven,' and |continuous improvement' foreign to everything they know about what government does and how it works" (Sensenbrenner, 1991, p. 199). He continues with an example of the perceived inferior quality of public sector service delivery: "People are making comparisons," says one quality expert. "They can call American Express on Monday and get a credit card in the mail by the end of the week, but it takes six weeks to get a lousy driver's license renewed. You might not think the motor vehicles division competes with American Express, but it does in the mind of the customer." In the preface of Reinventing Government, Osborne and Gaebler (1992) refer to a deep-rooted contempt of government, as reflected in several frequently repeated epithets that have become part of the popular culture. For example, "It's close enough for government work" suggests that expectations for accuracy and reliability, two core components of service quality, are not held as high for public sector products and services as for those produced by the private sector, while the sarcastically inflected "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" captures a supposedly widespread sentiment that public programs and those responsible for them are often lacking in responsiveness and sensitivity, two other dimensions of service quality. However, assumptions of the perceived inferiority of public services are not always sustained by more careful analysis. Charles Goodsell (1985) describes the "grand myth," deeply ingrained in American popular culture, that citizens are not satisfied with their governmental agencies and the services they perform, but in reviewing numerous surveys designed to solicit citizen ratings of public services, he finds generally favorable responses. Furthermore, client evaluations of specific services they receive tend to be more positive than ratings of these same services by the general public (Katz et al, 1975). …