Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory Advance Access published online on September 2, 2009
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, doi:10.1093/jopart/mup024
Customer, Partner, Principal: Local Government Perspectives on State Agency Performance in Georgia
Georgia State University
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Address correspondence to the author at jcthomas{at}gsu.edu.
Public agencies increasingly perform their functions in partnership with other public, nonprofit, and private sector actors, prompting growing research interest in how these collaborations function. As yet, almost no one has thought it worth asking how collaborative partners perceive each other's performance, although these perceptions may themselves constitute important measures of agency effectiveness. Their determinants, in turn, could point to how agency effectiveness might be enhanced. This article examines these perceptions and their possible determinants for the partnerships between the state of Georgia's Department of Transportation and the state's local governments. Drawing from prior research on citizen satisfaction with local governments, the article proposes a preliminary theory of local government partner perceptions of state agency performance, including several principal dimensions of those perceptions—customer, partner, and overseer or principal—and hypotheses on possible determinants of those perceptions. The relevance of the dimensions and the hypotheses are then tested using data from two surveys of local government officials in Georgia. A concluding section offers speculations on the meaning of these findings for thinking about public service collaborations.