Coproduction of Public Services

Abstract

Introduction Many public services rely on inputs from the public sector and from citizens, and indeed efficient service provision requires that citizens participate in service delivery in some way. Classic examples include citizens reporting crimes to the police and parents helping students with school attendance and homework. A growing literature shows that citizen participation in public service delivery – also known as citizen coproduction – can in fact increase the quality and efficiency of public services (Brudney 1983; Jakobsen and Andersen 2013). We still know little about what motivates citizens to participate in public service delivery. Some scholars simply assume that citizens are more likely to coproduce if it mainly benefits themselves (Percy 1984). If this is true, simply informing citizens about the personal benefits of coproducing should motivate them to coproduce more. In this chapter, we discuss three sources of citizen coproduction. First, we discuss how information about personal benefits can motivate citizens to coproduce. Second, we argue that citizen coproduction can be increased by providing citizens with the necessary resources to engage in coproduction. Third, we argue that changes in the level of public input may have an independent effect on citizen coproduction due to substitution or complementary effects. However, studying the antecedents of citizen coproduction is challenging. Problems of endogeneity weaken the internal validity of empirical studies based on observational data. Public initiatives aimed at enhancing citizen participation in the production and delivery of public services may target specific groups of citizens (either the most needy or the most resourceful in terms of coproduction), which will introduce selection bias in the identification of a causal effect. For example, if a school seeks to increase parents’ involvement in homework for children with low test scores, it is quite likely that we will observe a negative correlation between exposure to the initiative and test scores, even if the increased involvement has a positive effect – simply because the targeted children had lower scores to begin with. We argue that these problems can be addressed through the use of experimental methods. Based on a discussion of three field experiments conducted by the authors, we find that the more expensive initiatives (providing resources and increasing public sector input) can be effective, while the cheaper and frequently used alternative (providing information) is not.

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