Prescription for Government Performance: Fiscal Decentralization and Satisfaction With Public Service

Decentralization is considered a vital element to governance. However, the opinions and evidence on the effects of decentralization on government performance present a mixed picture. The long-running debate about the effects of decentralization has ignored types of government performance. In this study, it is argued that the attempts to improve the level of fiscal decentralization may or may not have the intended satisfaction with public services because of different types of public services. The purpose of this article is to investigate the impacts of fiscal decentralization on satisfaction with public hospital, public police, and public education. Employing multilevel models with the data from the International Monetary Fund and the Latinobarómetro, this paper shows that fiscal decentralization undermines satisfaction with public hospital and public education. However, it does not have a discernible effect on satisfaction with police. Drawing on the results that the impacts of decentralization are contingent on the nature or types of government performance, it is argued that a more nuanced view enhances the understanding of decentralization.