A new debate post by me on citizen expectations was just published in Altinget: Vive: Borgernes stigende forventninger til velfærden har konsekvenser – om de kan påvirkes er mindre entydigt – Altinget: Kommunal. The piece is behind paywall (and in Danish).
My points about citizen expactations are that it seems that expectations for the public services are ever rising, and that it will be very expensive to meet them only by investing more in the public services. This is also the conclusion from the Danish think tank Kraka. Looking a bit into the research on expectations, my point is that it could also be an idea to try to influence the citizens’ expectations. What can they actually expect from the public sector now and in the future?
This kind of expectation management is a normal part of crisis management for politicians and decision-makers. However, the research behind these attemts in managing citizen expectations is rather mixed. Much of what we know about citizen expectations comes from research on citizen satisfaction using the Expectation-disconfirmation model, stating that people are satisfied when the public service lives up to their expectations – and not so satisfied when it does not.
However, the construct of expectations is not always treated very thoroughly. Oliver James delivered a very nice piece on expectations management some years ago that I tried to follow up with some research the construct itself (see here, here, and here). One takeaway is that managing expectations depends a lot on what kind of expectation we are talking about. Are they normative (“should”) expecations, or are they predictive (“will”) expectations? In broad terms, it seems that predictive expectations, where the citizens is trying to predict how the future “will” be, are much easier to affect than the normative expectations that are probably more rooted in personality and attitudes about how the public sector “should” be.
There is not much doubt that citizen expectations have consequences. Kurer & Staalduinen’s cool study from Germany demonstrates that disappointed expectations about one’s own status can have electoral consequences, and a study from Chile indicates that disappointed labour market expectations also affects attitudes. From the literature on satisfaction, there is also evidence that the two different types of expectations affects satisfaction differently.
Some research succeeds in affecting citizen expectations, for example Jessica Gottlieb’s wunderful study from Mali, and in the study from Chile, the author also succeeds in affecting the labour market expectations. And this is my final point in the debate post: politicians and decision-makers can affect citizen expectations, perhaps even in the direction they would like. But we do not know much about how it can be done and the circumstances that it requires.
And of course: there is also an ethical and democratic debate to be had about the extent that citizens’ expecations should be managed! On the one hand, it seems to be the democratically elected politicians’ task to inform the citizenry about what they can expect – and not expect – from the public sector. But on the other hand, it seems to be the citizens’ right to inform the politicians about what they expect, too. Should that right be “managed”? And if so, how? At least they can always “throw the rascals out“. That is harder with other dicision-makers.