Effectiveness, efficiency, and equity tradeoffs in public programs: A citizen experiment

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Kenneth J. Meier,Jourdan Davis,Xiaoyang Xu
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13690

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Effectiveness, efficiency, and equity tradeoffs in public

programs: A citizen experiment

Kenneth J. Meier

1,2,3

| Jourdan Davis

4

| Xiaoyang Xu

5

1

Department of Public Administration and

Policy, School of Public Affairs, American

University, Washington, DC, USA

2

Cardiff School of Business, Cardiff University,

Cardiff, UK

3

Institute of Public Administration, Leiden

University, The Hague, the Netherlands

4

Department of Political Science and Public

Administration, University of North Carolina-

Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

5

McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown

University, Washington, DC, USA

Correspondence

Kenneth J. Meier, Department of Public

Administration and Policy, School of Public

Affairs, American University, Washington, DC

20016, USA.

Email: kmeier@american.edu

Abstract

Debates over public programs frequently focus on questions of effectiveness,

equity, and efficiency and the tradeoff among these objectives. Missing from the

literature is whether the general public cares about these tradeoffs, can perceive

such differences, and will act on them. This article reports on two pre-registered

vignette experiments where the effectiveness, equity, and efficiency are assessed

relative to experimental treatments focused on U.S. K-12 education involving test

scores, equality of test scores, and program costs. One experiment focuses on

equity in race and the other on equity in income. The experiments show that the

general public perceives differences in program effectiveness and equity, values

both, and is unwilling to tradeoff one for the other. The public cares about pro-

gram costs, but it lacks a sophisticated understanding of efficiency as a concept.

Inequalities in income appear to influence equity concerns more than those

involving race.

Evidence for Practice

•The general public can distinguish between effectiveness, equity, and efficiency

in evaluating programs if given information on these dimensions.

•Effectiveness, equity, and efficiency are all comparative terms and some criteria

for comparison needs to be available.

•Public judgments on effectiveness, equity, and efficiency are generally intuitive

and direct and not subject to complex calculations or explicit tradeoffs.

•How information is provided to the public is likely to affect the public’s ability to

make informed judgments about program performance.

•Performance information should be designed to provide information on equity

and efficiency as well as on effectiveness.

INTRODUCTION

Public programs tend to have multiple goals (Chun &

Rainey, 2005), multiple stakeholders with different goals

(Boyne, 2002,2003), or heterogeneous impacts across dif-

ferent population groups (Baekgaard & Serritzlew, 2016);

all three of these factors suggest that public programs

involve balancing of values that might at times be in con-

flict (Frederickson, 2015; Hall, 2022; Okun, 1975). Arthur

Okun (1975) argued that the central question of public

policy was how much should government intervene in

the market to provide for greater equity in contrast to

market allocations of goods and services which he

assumed to be efficient. Maximizing efficiency, he argued,

will benefit those with competitive advantages and, thus,

have consequences for those lacking education,

resources, or luck. Efficiency, he felt, resulted in inequality.

Within public administration, George Frederickson (2015)

has advocated that equity be given a greater value and

be at least equal to the classic pillars of economy and effi-

ciency. Similar policy debates followed the publication of

Thomas Piketty’sCapital in the Twenty-First Century

(Piketty, 2015) and a greater concern for the distributional

consequences of public policy.

Received: 22 May 2022 Revised: 18 June 2023 Accepted: 20 June 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13690

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

1462 Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1462–1477.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

This research examines how one important stakeholder

in public programs, the general public, assesses different

values when evaluating public program outcomes based on

effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. Although political

debates frequently focus on these evaluative dimensions

and some experimental evidence shows that civil servants

consider these concepts (Fern

andez-Gutiérrez & Van de

Walle, 2019), we were unable to find any studies of how indi-

vidual citizens make specific assessments of effectiveness,

equity, and efficiency when such factors vary (rather than as

generic responses to the same set of circumstances, see

Andrews & Van de Walle, 2013; Hvidman & Andersen, 2016;

or where there is some information on implied inequalities,

see Amirkhanyan et al., 2023;Walkeretal.,2018). This article

uses two preregistered internet vignette experiments

focused on public K-12 education in the United States that

manipulate performance indicators of effectiveness, equity,

and cost to determine if citizens can distinguish among

these concepts and whether or not they are likely to make

any tradeoffs among the three values in their evaluations of

government programs. The results indicate that the public

can distinguish between effectiveness, equity, and efficiency

in an intuitive manner although not in more sophisticated

ways. A second experiment shows that the public is more

sensitive to inequity based on socio-economic status than in

terms of race. Both experiments show that individuals are

more likely to act or intend to act based on effectiveness

and equity but not on efficiency. They also show that there

are group-specific heterogeneous responses to equity, effec-

tiveness, and efficiency but evidence of motivated reasoning

is less apparent.

The current study seeks to make contributions to both

public administration research andpractice. Although much

scholarly literature emphasizes tradeoffs among effective-

ness,efficiency,andequity;andpolicymakersclearlycon-

sider these factors, whether the public recognizes and

responds to differences in effectiveness, equity, and effi-

ciency as separate dimensions of evaluation remains an

open question (see Brunner et al., 2022). It also probes

whether the public tradesoff these values with each other

or views them independently and whether these values

influence their comfort with a public program and, hence,

the willingness to participate. For the world of practice, the

study illustrates the range of performance information that

the public finds relevant and the need to stress equity as

well as effectiveness (see Ruijer et al., 2023). Public adminis-

trators also frequently make decisions that tradeoff equity,

efficiency, and effectiveness, and knowing public prefer-

ences permit more responsive public policy.

THE THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL

TRADEOFF: EFFECTIVENESS, EQUITY, AND

EFFICIENCY

A central tenet of democratic governance is that public

policy and administration should be responsive to the

general public (Redford, 1969). As a result, an extensive

scholarly debate on conflict among of the values of effec-

tiveness, equity, and efficiency (Frederickson, 2015;

Okun, 1975; Piketty, 2015) is reflected in virtually all pro-

gram evaluation and policy analysis texts (Dunn 2015;

Jenkins-Smith 1990; Weimer and Vining 2017). Similar dis-

cussions exist in political science (Swank, 1998), econom-

ics (Gershberg & Schuermann, 2001; Okun, 1975)

sociology (Daw, 2015), law (Viscusi & Zeckhauser, 2005),

and other fields.

Perhaps representing the economics’ties to evaluation

research, efficiency is universally accepted as an evaluative

criterion for public programs (Andrews & Entwistle, 2013;

Brunner et al., 2022; de Graaf & Paanakker, 2015;Hood,1991;

Wang, 2022), but clearly not as the sole value (Fern

andez-

Gutiérrez & Van de Walle, 2019; Frederickson, 2015)andoften

acontestedvalue(LeGrand,1990). In fact, Le Grand (1990)

argues that efficiency cannotstandonitsownbutmustbe

considered as a secondary concern once the objectives of

effectiveness and equity are attained.

The logic for different dimensions of performance

starts with effectiveness; if a program does not achieve

the goals established for it, it makes little sense to con-

sider whether the program is efficient or if the distribu-

tion of program benefits is equitable. Given an effective

program, theoretically individuals can vary in how much

they value the program and thus how much they would

be willing to invest in program outcomes, that is, in the

relative efficiency of the program. Similarly, given an

effective program, then theoretically the distribution of

benefits across individuals and concerns about equity are

likely to arise. Just as I.M.D. Little (2002) notes that per-

ceptions of wealth are logically assessed in comparison to

one’s neighbors, the benefits of government programs

fall unequally across individuals, and people are likely to

respond in terms of how equitable they perceive the pro-

gram is. At both theoretical and practical levels, these dis-

tinctions among effectiveness, equity, and efficiency

require individuals to decide how to weigh each of these

criteria depending on how much they favor equity, effi-

ciency, and effectiveness relative to each other.

Despite the extensive literature debating these vari-

ous dimensions of program performance and recent work

that asks public administrators in general terms whether

they consider efficiency or equity in making decisions

(Fern

andez-Gutiérrez & Van de Walle, 2019), existing

research until recently did not address how one impor-

tant stakeholder, the public, values program outcomes in

terms of effectiveness, equity, or efficiency. Belle and Can-

tarelli (2022) recently examine the willingness of the pub-

lic to tradeoff economic benefits, individual restrictions,

and lives lost using a conjoint experiment on COVID-19

restrictions in Italy. Although they are not dealing with

the equity, efficiency, and effectiveness tradeoff directly,

they demonstrate how a behavioral public administration

approach can effectively manipulate various dimensions

of public performance and determine how individuals

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW 1463