Institutionally-Induced Attribution Errors

Abstract

Citizens can make mistakes in evaluating the quality of public services by misattributing responsibility for service provision. Both the traditional reform approach and the public choice theory suggest that such errors are systematically influenced by the structure of political institutions, albeit in nearly the opposite manner. To explore these competing hypotheses, this study develops a typology of evaluative errors which citizens might make and a method for decomposing evaluations into their "true" and "biased" elements, which are combined with survey data in a comparison group research design to assess the impact of metropolitan fragmentation/consolidation on citizen evaluations of government.