The Research Study On The Relevance Of Subjective And Objective Evaluation Of Government Performance

Since the 1970 s, with the rise of new public management thought and the growingdemand from the community to enhance government efficiency, the status and influence ofsubjective evaluation of government performance has become more critical. Governmentagencies around the world are using citizen or customer surveys to evaluate the quality ofpublic services, directly applying the evaluation results to improve the quality of governmentservices. However, with research being done further, a number of public management scholarsbegan to question whether it is proper to regard the citizen satisfaction as a synonym and theultimate standard for the performance of public services. They believe that public services cannot be a good feature to interpret the differences in the citizen satisfaction, the citizens`perception of the quality of public services can not accurately reflect the actual situation.However, some academics have suggested that in modern society, the citizens has the abilityto perceive the performance of public services, so the subjective evaluation results such as thecitizen satisfaction is well consistent with of the objective performance of the public services.Based on the academic controversy over the validity of the government’s subjectiveassessment, this paper attempts to explore the relevance of the citizen satisfaction andgovernment performance, and whether the public expectations and the openness ingovernment affairs produce moderating effect.This paper is consisted of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, mainlyintroduces the background, significance, research ideas and methods, and the concepts ofgovernment performance evaluation, etc will be defined. The second chapter is the literaturereview of the research of the government performance evaluation and the academiccontroversy over the validity of the government’s subjective assessment. The third chapterintroduced the theoretical model and hypotheses of this study. Chapter four is for data andmethodology. Chapter five is the part of the empirical analysis, which mainly described thefrequency statistics of the sample data and explored the impact mechanism of the variables.The sixth chapter is the summarization and analysis of the results of hypothesis testing, inwhich the author points out the limits of research and the possible field and direction of futureresearch.The results of the study show that:(1) The government performance have a positiveimpact on citizen satisfaction. When it is in the context of open government, the governmentperformance can have significant effect on citizen satisfaction, both in the direction or thequantity;(2)The public expectations does have a significant direct negative impact on citizensatisfaction, that is, the higher expectation, the lower satisfaction;(3) Openness, publicexpectations both produced a moderating effects between government performance andcitizen satisfaction. The former has a positive impact while the latter has a negative impact.