The Case for Municipal Research

For too many local government administrators a citizen survey carries all the romance and excitement of a dog bite. Staff members assigned the task of managing a citizen survey confront required social scientific methods and statistics with ears pressed back and a frozen snarl. It doesn't have to be this way. To the uninitiated city or county official citizen surveys sound great at first but lingering distrust of social science methods and research experts can quickly overwhelm the good feelings. We know more than one administrator who, when confronted by what appeared to be naive social science types trying to sell a "scientific survey," anxiously interjected the seasoned administrator's point of view that "anyone can lie with statistics."

Of course, the old bromide about statistics is true, but the more profound verity is that anyone can lie with words. History's biggest lies were not perpetrated with numbers. The reason that lies of words are not so terrifying is that they can be exposed by people with no special technical training. Words we understand. Politics and polemics we understand. Interest groups, litigations, moral failings are part of our daily currency. If deceit is entangled in these human connections, we understand. On the other hand, statistics, random sampling, survey design, computer analysis- this is the lexicon of aliens and it can fool most of us easily.

The administrator's fear of surveys rises as his or her fluency in the language of social science falls. To learn the language is to apprehend the lie. Even a modest acquaintance with the parlance of social sciences should diminish the fear that someone will sell you a bill of statistical goods.

The findings from hundreds of citizen surveys conducted across the United States have been dismissed as the dross of policy studies, interesting to local officials but without much value to others. The need to do something more with citizen surveys comes from our suspicion that they have made better public relations than public policy. It is to public policy that citizen surveys can speak with greatest authority, but in the absence of sound comparisons, city and county administrators and elected officials are hard put to act on the results of a local citizen survey.

Is a "good" evaluation for police good enough? Can we expect more from a street repair service that gets only" fair" evaluations? We suspect that the absence of normative data about service evaluations omits an important ingredient from the soup of politics and information that feeds public policy. It is reference to how others are doing that fuels political debate. Are we getting our fair share of legislators, tax dollars, wages, Rhodes scholars, protection from crime, clean streets? If not, why not? How can we improve our place in the community of nations, states, municipalities? Should the results of our efforts stir nothing more than a desire for better comparative data about the quality of local governments, we will be heartened.

When George Gallup was a young man just making his reputation as a political pollster, he confronted skeptics who " ...thought we were an evil force which might lead the country straight to Hell-or direct democracy, which they regarded as equally terrifying." Since the early days of polling, survey methods have been refined, have gained (sometimes grudging) respect, and have broadened their applications to include far more than prediction of presidential elections.

Citizen surveys-surveys of residents sponsored by local governments-are offshoots of the seed planted by early 20th century pollsters. Surveys attending to citizens' needs, behaviors, characteristics, policy preferences, service evaluations-to their hopes and dreams-fill the libraries and offices of city and county governments across the country.

The evaluative survey is used to collect citizens' opinions about their local government services. It is, if you will, a consumer scorecard. Common practice in the realm of service evaluation is to get citizen judgment on a complaint basis. By this method, evaluations of local government services seem to come right after a snowstorm (when streets are impassable and motorists are irate). But snowstorms of criticism are no way to judge the quality of services.

Because evaluative surveys provide so much information so much more efficiently than any other kind of citizen participation, they are one of the most useful management tools for local government administrators.