Performance Information and Citizen Service Attitudes: Do Cost Information and Service Use Affect the Relationship?

Performance information has been suggested as a means to increase the capacity of decision makers and citizens to make informed decisions. This article studies the impact of performance information on citizens' attitudes to whether service programs should be expanded. Service programs are generally highly demanded by citizens and some-but not all-citizens are active service users. By nesting two experiments in a survey of 1,866 Danish citizens, the research shows that performance information matters more to service attitudes if allocated in conjunction with cost information and that performance information is more important to the attitudes of service users than to those of non-users. These findings suggest that information on performance for specific services should be presented simultaneously with information on costs in order to create more nuanced attitudes among citizens and that this is of particular importance in service areas with major groups of core users.