Citizen Satisfaction and the Kaleidoscope of Government Performance: How Multiple Stakeholders See Government Performance

Performance assessment is a central issue for modern governments; however, little attention has been paid to the similarities and differences among various performance indicators. This study investigates how different performance assessments relate to each other by incorporating multiple stakeholders’ perspectives on performance at the individual level. Combining three different surveys and archival data on secondary education, we analyze how academic performance indicators are associated with service users’ (parents’ and students’) and service providers’ (teachers’) judgments of school quality. Our findings suggest that parents, students, and teachers provide similar assessments of school performance, and these assessments reflect the actual quality of the schools. Their evaluations are more closely aligned to archival performance indicators in high-performing schools than low-performing schools. In addition to the convergent validity of the various performance measures, we also find indirect evidence that the perceptual measures have discriminant validity relative to archival measures. The consistency of performance indicators in a centralized regime (South Korea) also contributes to the generalizability of existing theory.