Citizens’ Evaluations of the Public Sector

The performance of public sector agencies constitutes a longstanding concern in both policy and academia. Recent research suggests that citizens associate the public sector with ineffectiveness and wastefulness. This article approaches this debate by examining how citizens’ perception of whether an organization is public or not affects their performance assessment. The study is based on two large-scale experiments conducted among representative samples of Danish citizens. The findings show that citizens’ attitudes towards the public sector can be multifaceted and may not always be negative. First, public organizations may be perceived to be less effective than private organizations, but their distribution of outputs is perceived to be more equitable. Second, as evaluations of public sector performance are conditional on respondents’ personal beliefs, negative perceptions appear to be concentrated among a subgroup of citizens.