Assessing public services from the citizen perspective: what can we learn from surveys?

Abstract

Surveys have become an established means by which scholars can evaluate and assess the quality of public services provided by governments. Though surveys must be interpreted with caution, as explained here, they also have the advantage of providing useful insights about public services that cannot easily be gauged from other assessment techniques. After briefly expounding on the use of surveys, we go on to present the papers included in this special issue and the main insights they bring onto questions of assessing public services from the citizen perspective.