Public Service Efficacy

While this move may be rationalized by an expected gain in quality and responsiveness of the suppliers to the desires of the users, the argument in favor of empowerment of public service users hinges crucially on their capactiy for autonomous actions. This points to the necessity of being able to measure such capacities. To date no such measure exist.

In this paper we propose a reflective measure of user capacity; named "Public Service Efficacy" (PSE), as our measure is much in line with the well-known measure of political efficacy. We apply the PSE measure in four different sectors, hospitals, elementary schools, day care and higher education. Tests of validity and reliability indicate good properties and consistent patterns across all sectors.