Public meetings as engagement or ritual? Participation prevalence and aggregated perceptions of local government performance

Purpose Public meetings are among the most common participation venues in local governance, yet little is known about how participation prevalence relates to aggregated public perceptions of local government performance, particularly across in-person and online modalities. Design/methodology/approach Using aggregated survey data from 151 U.S. municipalities, we estimate municipal-level fractional logit models linking in-person and online participation prevalence to the share of residents reporting positive perceptions of service quality. We also report ordinary least squares (OLS) and beta regression models as robustness checks in the Appendix. Findings Our findings show that online participation prevalence is consistently associated with less favorable aggregated service quality perceptions, whereas in-person participation prevalence shows weaker and less stable associations across specifications. Research limitations/implications The study relies on aggregated cross-sectional data from 2014-15 and captures a pre-pandemic stage of online public meeting participation. The findings should therefore be interpreted as municipal-level associations in an earlier participation environment. Results suggest that expanding online access alone may not yield more favorable aggregated evaluations when participation lacks visible responsiveness and decision influence. Originality/value This study advances organizational-level participation research by isolating public meetings as a distinct local participation institution, focusing on aggregated public perceptions of service quality, and showing that associations between participation prevalence and municipal-level evaluations of government performance differ across in-person and online meeting modalities.