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Citizen coproduction, that is, citizens' input to the provision of public services, holds great potential to improve services provided to citizens. It is therefore important to understand why some citizens are more likely to coproduce than others. Citizens' skills and knowledge to coproduce are argued to be crucial for their contribution to coproduction, but research on this topic is sparse. Building on coproduction theory supplemented with theoretical insights from social psychology theory, the main contribution of this study is to develop theoretical arguments that describe how self-efficacy perception may moderate the influence of knowledge of how to coproduce on citizen coproduction undertaken by individual citizens. A large- N study in the field of education is used to examine this relation.

AbstractPrior research has shown that public participation initiatives may have positive effects on how participating citizens view government. However, little is known about whether and how priming citizens to think about such initiatives influences the view of government among the larger public. Using a survey experiment, we find that the effect of priming citizens to think of a public participation initiative that includes a small group of citizens on their view of government is conditional on how proximate the service, which the initiative resolves around, is to citizens. Notably, across outcome measures we a find a negative priming effect among those for which the service is not proximate. These results are highly important, as they suggest that among the larger public, public participation initiatives—that involve few citizens—may have mixed results on the view of government, thus questioning the legitimacy of decisions reached by such initiatives.

The quantity and quality of public services are improved when citizens coproduce, that is, contribute input to public service provision. It is therefore becoming increasingly common for local governments to initiative coproduction initiatives in order to enhance citizen input to coproduction. However, we know little about how these initiatives influence citizens' motivation to coproduce. Using lower secondary education as the relevant service area, this study tests the effect of a coproduction initiative on parents' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Our results show that only intrinsic motivation is positively and significantly related to citizen input to coproduction, and for less educated parents the initiative was found to have a negative effect on their intrinsic motivation. These results highlight how important it is that local governments pay attention to unintended motivation effects when they initiate coproduction initiatives.

Offentlige serviceydelser tilvejebringes ofte via samproduktion, dvs. gennem et miks af input fra offentligt ansatte og de brugere, som modtager serviceydelserne. Eftersom brugernes bidrag kan føre til en forbedring af kvaliteten og mængden af de offentlige serviceydelser, bliver der i stigende omfang iværksat offentlige samproduktionstiltag, som har til formål at øge brugernes bidrag. På baggrund af den eksisterende forskning ved vi meget lidt om, hvilken effekt sådanne tiltag har på servicebrugernes motivation til at samproducere. Ved brug af et empirisk eksempel fra folkeskoleområdet tester vi effekten af et samproduktionstiltag på forældrenes intrinsiske og ekstrinsiske motivation. Hovedresultatet er, at samproduktionstiltaget navnlig for lavtuddannede forældre har en negativ effekt på deres intrinsiske motivation. Dette resultat understreger vigtigheden af, at offentlige myndigheder, som iværksætter tiltag af denne art, er opmærksomme på eventuelle utilsigtede motivationseffekter, som kan betyde, at den tilsigtede adfærdsændring ikke indfries.

The quantity and quality of public services are improved when citizens coproduce, that is, contribute input to public service provision. It is therefore becoming increasingly common for local governments to initiative coproduction initiatives in order to enhance citizen input to coproduction. However, we know little about how these initiatives influence citizens' motivation to coproduce. Using lower secondary education as the relevant service area, this study tests the effect of a coproduction initiative on parents' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Our results show that only intrinsic motivation is positively and significantly related to citizen input to coproduction, and for less educated parents the initiative was found to have a negative effect on their intrinsic motivation. These results highlight how important it is that local governments pay attention to unintended motivation effects when they initiate coproduction initiatives.

Despite the clear benefits volunteers can bring to public service organizations, their involvement may also create or exacerbate challenges for managers in ensuring clear roles for professionals staffing such organizations. We argue that simple, strategic communication messages can clarify the relative roles of volunteers and professionals. We test this assertion with a low-cost experimental communication experiment embedded in a survey of 240 professionals employed at nursing homes in Denmark. Our results show that strategic communication to clarify volunteer roles reduces professionals' perceived ambiguity about volunteer roles and the relative roles of volunteers and professional staff. These results are encouraging as many public service organizations seek to involve more volunteers, and managers can implement the kind of strategic communication studied in this article straightforwardly without high costs.

AbstractWhile public service professionals may rely on stereotypes and social categories in exercising who gets what, when and how in clientelist citizen‐state interactions, it remains unclear whether negative judgments similarly pervade in settings where citizens help produce–rather than consume–public services. We propose that service professionals judge volunteers as incompetent based on (1) a lack of the skills necessary to solve specific tasks, and/or (2) negative stereotypes toward volunteers as a means of shielding the privileged position of the profession or safeguarding the quality of services. Using an experiment among 817 nursing home professionals, negative judgments of volunteer competence were invoked simply by priming professionals to think of citizens volunteering in service production. The effect, however, is not conditional on the type of task (complementary vs. core) solved by volunteers, suggesting that judgments of competence mainly stem from stereotypes of volunteer (in)competence in assisting with service production.

AbstractInvolving volunteers in the production and delivery of public services is a core policy objective of governments around the world. While existing research on volunteer involvement in service production, for example, has focused on advantages and disadvantages of such involvement and different dimensions of volunteer involvement, little is known about service professionals' response to volunteer involvement in public service production. Integrating perspectives from multiple theories, we build a theoretical framework for understanding how and when service professionals come to see volunteers as a threat to the quality of service, the profession's privileged position and monopoly, and professionals' own work tasks and job security. Based on a central distinction between production of core and complementary tasks, we propose that volunteers come to be seen as a threat in the eyes of service professionals when volunteers solve core rather than complementary tasks. Using a survey experiment among health assistants at nursing homes, we find partial support for our argument. Health assistants are more likely to perceive volunteers as a threat to the quality of care when volunteers solve core rather than complementary tasks. The study guides research toward a more nuanced understanding of volunteer involvement in service production in public organizations.

Non-professional actors such as volunteers, service users, and citizens increasingly contribute to the production of public services. While increased involvement of such non-professionals is expected to have positive effects on the capacity of public organizations, few studies have explored professionals' attitudes towards this trend. A central question concerns what services professionals see as core tasks that ought to be performed by professionals. We introduce a theoretical distinction between core and complimentary tasks and use a survey to investigate how health assistants employed at nursing homes classify various tasks along these two categories. Finally, we examine whether health assistants with a short and long education classify the same set of tasks differently, thereby shedding light on the importance of the degree of professionalism for the classification of concrete tasks as either core or complimentary.

Ikkefagprofessionelle aktører såsom frivillige, servicebrugere og borgere bidrager i stigende grad til produktionen af offentlige serviceydelser. Mens øget inddragelse af ikkefagprofessionelle aktører forventes at have en positiv effekt på offentlige organisationers kapacitet, findes der kun begrænset forskningsmæssig viden om fagprofessionelles syn på denne udvikling. Et centralt spørgsmål er, hvilke serviceydelser fagprofessionelle ser som kerneopgaver, der bør leveres af de fagprofessionelle selv. Vi introducerer en teoretisk distinktion mellem kerneopgaver og komplementære opgaver og undersøger ved hjælp af en spørgeskemaundersøgelse fagprofessionelles klassifikation af specifikke opgaver på plejehjemsområdet som henholdsvis kerneopgaver og komplementære opgaver. Dernæst undersøger vi, om sosu-hjælpere og sosu-assistenter klassificerer de samme opgaver forskelligt, og dermed om graden af professionalisme har betydning for klassifikationen af kerneopgaver.

Immigrant students in Denmark on average perform worse in lower secondary school than native Danish students. Part of the effect may not stem from the immigrant students themselves, but from the student composition at the school. From a policy perspective, the latter aspect is quite interesting since it is more feasible to change student composition in schools than the socioeconomic status of the individual students. This article describes theoretically the circumstances under which total student achievement can be increased by reallocating certain groups of students. Empirical analyses of Danish register data of more than 40,000 students suggest that the gain in total student achievement by reallocating immigrant students is minor. The educational outcome of immigrant students can however, ceteris paribus, be increased, at minimal expense to the majority of native Danish students' educational outcome, by limiting the share of immigrant students at grade level at any one school to less than 50 percent. The policy implications of this finding are discussed.

AbstractResearch suggests that citizens often abstain from taking up benefits for which they are eligible because of the costs of learning about how to apply for and the compliance and psychological costs associated with taking up benefits. But to what extent can such burdens be altered simply by changing the way rules are communicated? Bridging literatures on administrative burden, communication theory, and cognitive psychology, we theorize and test the causal impact (using a pre‐registered randomized survey experiment (N = 2243)) of two prominent aspects of rule communication: information structure and bureaucratic language. Our findings lend support to the expectation that bureaucratic language influences citizens' learning costs as well as their compliance – and to a lesser extent psychological – costs, even when the content of the rules communicated is the same.