Exploring government-citizen interaction in public service performance assessment: trade-offs, synergies, and critical issues

Citizens’ participation and direct initiatives are on the rise, including in assessing public service performance. Performance measurement and government-citizen interactions have been traditionally studied separately in public administration scholarship. To bridge this gap, this article integrates these two bodies of literature, proposing a typology of approaches to government-citizen interactions in public service performance assessment and highlighting their features. It also discusses the possible synergies and trade-offs emerging at the intersection between “interaction” and “assessment”. In particular, the article focuses on how relevance, reliability, and understandability shape and are shaped by the interaction between governments and citizens in both government-led and citizen-led initiatives of performance assessment. Finally, the paper puts forward a research agenda for the study of interactive forms of public service performance measurement.