Measures of Citizen Evaluation of Local Government Services

In recent research on local government efforts have been made to suggest and/or construct policy output or decision-making models that bring together several types of data. This paper seeks to specify such models by broadening the data base so that resource allocation is not simply predicated on previous expenditure patterns or simple relationships based on the cost of a unit of service. According to James Coleman, the need for multiple sources of data is among the principles that should govern policy research. For policy research, the criteria of parsimony and elegance that apply in discipline research are not important; the correctness of the predictions or results is important, and redundancy is valuable. The methodological factors supporting that propostion dictate the use of multiple sources of data and multiple methods of data analysis. The object of this paper will be to address Coleman’s policy principle from an intermediate and necessarily narrower perspective: we review thc utility of incorporating survey data into models studying the outputs of local government, stressing questions related to measurement. Researchers at the Urban Institute have been developing municipal service models conceptualizing productivity measurement in terms of several types of input measurements.