Mette Kjærgaard Thomsen

Public organizations are deeply dependent on input from citizens to help coproduce public services (Ostrom 1996; Nabatchi et al. 2017). For example, the police cannot prevent and solve crime if cit...

Prior research has shown that public participation initiatives may have positive effects on how participating citizens view government. However, little is known about whether and how priming citizens to think about such initiatives influences the view of government among the larger public. Using a survey experiment, we find that the effect of priming citizens to think of a public participation initiative that includes a small group of citizens on their view of government is conditional on how proximate the service, which the initiative resolves around, is to citizens. Notably, across outcome measures we a find a negative priming effect among those for which the service is not proximate. These results are highly important, as they suggest that among the larger public, public participation initiatives—that involve few citizens—may have mixed results on the view of government, thus questioning the legitimacy of decisions reached by such initiatives.

While public service professionals may rely on stereotypes and social categories in exercising who gets what, when and how in clientelist citizen‐state interactions, it remains unclear whether negative judgments similarly pervade in settings where citizens help produce–rather than consume–public services. We propose that service professionals judge volunteers as incompetent based on (1) a lack of the skills necessary to solve specific tasks, and/or (2) negative stereotypes toward volunteers as a means of shielding the privileged position of the profession or safeguarding the quality of services. Using an experiment among 817 nursing home professionals, negative judgments of volunteer competence were invoked simply by priming professionals to think of citizens volunteering in service production. The effect, however, is not conditional on the type of task (complementary vs. core) solved by volunteers, suggesting that judgments of competence mainly stem from stereotypes of volunteer (in)competence in assisting with service production.

En måde at organisere samskabelse på i kommunerne er udvalg nedsat efter styrelseslovens § 17, stk. 4. Disse 17-4-udvalg kan ikke tage beslutninger, kan nedsættes ad hoc, kan have medlemmer, der ikke er valgt til kommunalbestyrelsen, og søger ofte at arbejde på tværs af traditionelle sektorområder. For at et 17-4-udvalg kan have potentiale som forum for samskabelse, må det kræves, at udvalget har politikudvikling som fokus, og at der udover kommunalpolitikere også er eksterne ikkeoffentlige aktører som medlemmer. En rundspørge til alle landets kommuner viser, at otte ud af ti kommuner har et eller flere 17-4-udvalg. Selvom der oftest sidder en kommunalpolitiker for bordenden som formand, så har de fleste udvalg eksterne medlemmer. Og en stor del af dem arbejder med politikudvikling. Samlet har to ud af tre 17-4-udvalg potentiale som samskabelsesforum. Fra kommunernes synsvinkel bidrager især disse 17-4-udvalg med at gøre det politiske arbejde mere lydhørt overfor borgerne og tilføre et bedre vidensgrundlag for politiske beslutninger.

The value of coproduction—the joint productive efforts by regular producers, such as teachers, and consumer producers, such as parents, in helping children to learn—has been recognized for some time. However, strong empirical evidence of how these benefits can be achieved is scarce, and recent research has found mixed results. A new randomized field trial replicates elements of previous studies and extends them by using an additional age-appropriate outcome measure. Methodologically, the results illustrate the challenges of carrying out replication studies because when target groups change, outcome measures also often change. Substantially, the findings suggest that a government initiative providing parents with materials and information to enhance parents’ coproduction efforts can be extended to a broader target group of parents. Together, the findings illustrate how findings from single studies should be generalized with caution and the value of working systematically with replications and extensions.

Teacher's aides are used worldwide, in various school systems, although, there is no strong evidence of their impact on student outcomes. We use a randomized trial to challenge this state of evidence. We randomly allocate 105 schools to two types of treatments—aides with or without a teaching degree—compared to a control group. Both types of aides have positive impacts on test scores and the effects are persistent over time for disadvantaged students. Exploratory analyses of mechanisms suggest that a teacher's aide is not just a class-size reduction, but especially impactful when sharing instructional responsibility for the classroom.