Effects of ideology on citizen evaluation and satisfaction with local administration

Resumen

During the last two decades, political scientists have found that satisfaction paradigm, coming from marketing and management schools, could be applied to explain citizen satisfaction with a public provider. Another line of research has also found the effects of ideology on the evaluation of public action. However, the study of how ideology affects the mechanism of quality-satisfaction has not been sufficiently examined. The main objective of this research is to explore the influence of personal ideology in the perceived-quality satisfaction relationship. These results could be relevant for the debate about the convenience of using subjective data as valid metric of administrative action's efficacy. Using data from a survey in nine Spanish cities, and using structural equations techniques, it has been verified that the ideology would not only be attenuating the strength of the relationship between perceived quality and satisfaction, at least in these specific contexts, but it would be showing some unexpected pattern of influence.