ABSTRACT

While the U.S. federal government has adopted myriad initiatives mandating collection of citizen evaluations of its services, scant research exists into how prior biases such as those arising from political partisanship affect these performance metrics. In this study, we examine a multi-year sample asking U.S. citizens about their experiences with federal government services (n = 8,341). Guided by motivated reasoning theory, the results show that partisanship affects citizen satisfaction, confidence, and trust in the federal government during both Democratic (2015–2016) and Republican (2017–2018) presidential administrations. However, the results indicate an asymmetric ‘president-in-power’ effect, complicating efforts to interpret this data dynamically and over time as power changes hands.

摘要

尽管美国联邦政府已经采取了无数举措，要求收集公民对其服务的评估，但对于先前的偏见（例如政治党派偏见引起的偏见）如何影响这些绩效指标的研究很少。在这项研究中，我们检查了一个多年样本，询问美国公民他们在联邦政府服务方面的经历（n = 8,341）。在动机推理理论的指导下，结果表明，在民主党（2015-2016 年）和共和党（2017-2018 年）总统执政期间，党派偏见会影响公民对联邦政府的满意度、信心和信任。然而，结果表明存在不对称的“掌权总统”效应，随着权力易手，随着时间的推移动态地解释这些数据的努力变得复杂。