In the last decades, waves of structural reforms have been implemented in OECD countries to create more efficient public services, causing some organizations to have experienced severe and continuous trajectories of for instance mergers, splits and changes in legal form. While governments continuously impose structural reforms to improve public sector performance, we may simultaneously expect such continuous structural reforms to have detrimental side-effects, such as strong reductions in employee job satisfaction. Recognizing that continuous structural reforms have become a pervasive feature of modern public sectors, the research proposed here will innovatively investigate (a) the effect of extensive structural reform histories on post-reform levels of job satisfaction and (b) the impact of such reform histories on the long-term recuperation of job satisfaction levels following sequences of reforms. We utilize a combination of both large-N regression analysis and a small-N natural experiment. Both the large-N and small-N phases will utilize two measurement points, not only allowing us to assess the long-term development of job satisfaction, but also to improve causal inference. As job satisfaction has been linked with factors such as performance, turnover and even sick leave on the basis of single reform studies, but the long-term effects of continuous structural reforms remain unexplored, the project holds important implications for scholars and policy-makers.
Customer satisfaction regarding public services is often only loosely coupled to changes in actual performance. This gap between satisfaction and performance may lead to misguided reforms and may erode trust in public services. Literature shows how the incapacity of customers to assess actual performance can be attributed to the bounded rationality of customers. We know less about how public communication influences this bounded decision making that underlies the performance-satisfaction gap. With the rise of social media, the communication channels for public sector organizations have grown extensively. Twitter has become the dominant medium since it allows public organizations to interact directly with large audiences and offer live updates on services. Twitter should be ideally suited to address the information problem and thus to mitigate the performance-satisfaction gap. Yet, studies to the potential benefits and effects of social media within a public sector context are lacking. This project therefore asks whether and how public communication by public service providers via Twitter reduces the performance satisfaction gap. Using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest setup with advanced time series modelling, this project will bring new insights on what influences satisfaction of public services, the effect of public communication through social media as well as methodological innovation in the use of social media sources for Public Administration research.