Good Local Governance: What Do Citizens Expect And How Does This Affect Their Satisfaction?

Good governance is a widely used concept in the contemporary politico-administrative discourse. In public administration there is a growing consensus about the need to broaden the spectrum of criteria that are relevant for the evaluation of public sector performance. In addition to the traditional values of public administration like efficiency and effectiveness, democratic values should also be taken into account. The discipline is moving “beyond traditional public administration and New Public Management” and is increasingly paying attention to the changing roles of citizens in public governance. But what citizens themselves consider as good governance and how this affects their evaluations of their municipality is an under-researched topic. In this paper we change the perspective and give the word to the citizens. First, we ask: How satisfied are citizens with their municipality? But satisfaction with the municipality might refer to a number of things – both policy outputs and characteristics of local democracy. This leads us to the second question of this paper: How important are functional and procedural value orientations for citizens’ ideas about what constitutes good local governance? On the basis of the answers to this question, a final section of the paper is devoted to exploring how normative expectations are related to the way citizens evaluate their municipality and their local government: Do citizens with different value priorities evaluate local democracy and life in their municipality differently? The data used in this paper stem from a comparative survey undertaken in four countries: Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands.