The social construction of performance judgements: Do opinions of others influence how citizens evaluate government?

This study investigates how citizens form and update their evaluations of public services, focusing on the role of peer opinions in shaping these perceptions. Public services, as a collective process where the accumulative experiences of every user matters for healthy civic environment, may be particularly susceptible to information from peers when evaluating public performance. Using parallel randomized survey experiments (n = 4,752) in two contexts in Vienna, Austria, we explore whether citizens consider peer evaluations of public service when forming their own judgements. Our findings indicate that the presence of peer evaluations reduces variance in participants’ opinions, suggesting that individuals are influenced by the opinions of others. We also compare whether the format of the information matters and we find that presenting diversity of peer evaluations reduced convergence toward the average opinion. However, we find that whether citizens receive peers’ evaluation prior to or after forming their own opinion is not a factor in their evaluation of public performance. This research contributes to the literature on bureaucratic reputation and has practical implications for public administration by highlighting the complexities of shaping public perceptions.