Buying from Local Providers: The Role of Governance Preferences in Assessing Performance Information

• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Author: Amandine Lerusse,Steven Van de Walle
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13491

Research Article

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Steven Van de Walle is a Research

Professor of Public Management at the

KU Leuven Public Governance Institute,

Belgium. His research interests include

public sector reform and interactions

between citizens and public services.

His work has been published in leading

public administration journals, including

Governance and Public Administration

Review.

Email: steven.vandewalle@kuleuven.be

Abstract: Governance preferences influence how public officials process performance data about service providers.

Based on motivated reasoning theory, we examine the extent to which local delivery preferences—preferences for

contracting with local service providers over contracting with non-local ones—influence public managers’ and

politicians’ interpretation of performance data. We firstly expect public officials to misinterpret evidence that

contradicts their local delivery preferences and we, secondly, hypothesize that politicians are more prone to biases than

public managers are. We test these hypotheses by conducting a randomized survey experiment among 4,000 public

officials in Belgium. The results indicate that public officials tend to show a bias for local providers, but not for non-

local providers. Yet, we found no significant differences between politicians and public managers. Our study provides

new evidence about the influence of governance preferences on the interpretation of performance information, and calls

into question its effective use by politicians and public managers.

Evidence for Practice

• (Local) politicians and public managers hold governance preferences, such as preferences for the public or

private provision of public services, or preferences for local over non-local public service providers.

• Public officials’ governance preferences lead to biased interpretation of performance information.

• Politicians and public managers who have preferences for working with local public service providers tend to

misinterpret information about the performance of such a provider.

• Public managers are just like politicians influenced by their governance preferences when they are assessing

performance data.

Favoring local over non-local public service

providers features prominently in political

rhetoric, often as part of ethnocentric and

nationalist discourses (Jedinger and Burger2020;

Mutz2018; van der Waal and de Koster Van der Waal

and de Koster2018; Colantone and Stanig2018).

It reflects ideas and policies that are similar to those

developed at national and supranational levels. The

“Buy American Act,” for instance, compels the US

Government to favor US enterprises when contracting

as a way to stimulate employment (Dixon, Rimmer,

and Waschik2018). Likewise, several European

Union (EU) member states have stressed their

commitment to the development of a “Buy European

Act” that would favor EU over non-EU enterprises in

public procurement (European Parliament 2014).

Buying local has come to be seen as a positive

approach to public procurement (Keulemans and

Van de Walle2017). Favoring local providers is seen

as a strategy to support local actors with the aim to

promote sustainable public procurement (Grandia

and Meehan2017). More specifically, procuring

from local actors allows local authorities to develop

local economies, to protect local employment, or to

signal political or moral convictions (Brammer and

Walker2011; Nijaki and Worrel2012; Walker and

Brammer2009).

Public procurement literature has however highlighted

that strongly preferring a local public service provider

to a non-local one may reduce economies of scale and

hinder the development of comparative advantage.

When the local provider performs worse, it may

also increase the overall cost of public procurement

contracts (Baránek and Titl2020). In addition,

preferences for local providers have been linked

to favoritism, nepotism, and corruption in public

procurement (Dávid-Barrett and Fazekas2020).

We argue that preferring local to non-local providers,

or having local public service delivery preferences,

is a very salient type of governance preferences.

Governance preferences “reflect ideological beliefs

about the appropriate processes in and design of the

public sector” (Christensen et al.2018, 198). Public

Amandine Lerusse is an Assistant

Professor at the Institute of Public

Administration, Leiden University. Her

research examines, through experimental

approaches, politicians’ and public managers’

decision-making behavior and preferences

with regard to external service providers.

Email: a.v.lerusse@fgga.leidenuniv.nl

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 5, pp. 835–849. © 2022 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of

American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13491.

Buying from Local Providers: The Role of Governance

Preferences in Assessing Performance Information

Amandine LerusseSteven Van de Walle

Leiden University,The NetherlandsKU Leuven,Belgium