Does the Order of Information Presented in Performance Reports Create Bias in Citizens’ Perceptions of Public Service Performance?

The performance of public services is increasingly reported to citizens to facilitate user choice of services and to enhance accountability and democratic control. However, the order with which people evaluate different pieces of information has been shown to affect perceptions and judgment in many domains (Carlson, Meloy and Russo 2006; Bond et al 2007). We ask if order effects apply to public service performance reporting to citizens. The issue is important because information providers, particularly politicians and public managers, could influence citizens through their control over the presentation of such information. We use an experiment with randomization of intervention to assess order effects in reports of school performance. The experiment assesses if more favourable citizen evaluations are achieved by presenting positive information in the beginning or at the end of reporting identical information presented in a different order. The experimental participants are a sample of 1000 British citizens. Using the method adopted by Bond and colleagues (Bond et al 2007) to track participants’ preferences as the decision task progresses, we implement the step-wise evolution of preferences technique to assess order effects. Respondents are asked how appealing they find the school to be based on the information they encounter piece by piece, and how likely they would be to place their own child in the school. Data will be collected through Qualtrics’ respondent panel allowing the results of the analysis to be reported in good time for the conference. Support for the hypothesis would question performance information as a straightforward tool for informing user choice and improving public accountability, and suggest the need for regulation of performance reporting by service providers.