What makes citizens satisfied or dissatisfied with public services? Are they discrete public goods, certain characteristics of service organizations, processes, or their combinations? Citizen satisfaction has been widely used as an indicator for government performance. In South Korea, for example, Ministry of Public Administration and Security has been using citizen satisfaction in evaluating central public agencies, local governments, and local public corporations and authorities. So does Ministry of Planning and Budget in evaluating central public enterprises and corporation. The Seoul metropolitan government also applied citizen satisfaction measures derived from citizen panels and citizen surveys in evaluating departments’ performances until it met seriously sullen voices from public servants. The sullen voices of public servants, of course, were a reflection of the frustration that citizen satisfaction could not be proper measures of their performances. Some of their tasks may serve public interests while not necessarily contributing to citizen satisfaction. Difficulties and frustration in using citizen satisfaction as a measure of government performance may have been being alleviated by better sampling and operationalization. However, a fundamental question still remains. Do we actually know what comprises the phenomenon of citizen satisfaction?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of citizen satisfaction conceptually and empirically. Specifically, the paper will try to answer the following questions: (1) To what extent is citizen satisfaction a function of citizens’ evaluative judgments about the quality and quantity of public services, i.e. government’s public service performance, (2) To what extent is citizen satisfaction a function of citizens’ evaluative judgments about the government body per se, such as their judgments upon the quality of government officials, policy-making processes, the level of corruption, etc., (3) What can be some variables that could immensely undermine citizen satisfaction? A possible list of variable could include the sense of partiality in the distribution of public services, political alienation, etc. The political psychological notion of protected value could be drawn upon in finding and discussing on these variables, (4) Are the variables leading to citizen satisfaction and dissatisfaction same? Citizen satisfaction and dissatisfaction may be on one continuum. However, there could be variables that are conducive to citizen dissatisfaction, but not citizen satisfaction, as Herzberg named them hygiene factors in the context of organizational behavior.

This study uses a national citizen survey, which I conducted in November of 2011. A stratified random sampling technique was adopted to cover 15 provinces of South Korea. The sample size of the data is 2,000. The questions were asked at not only the general government level, but also public services level. The public service areas covered include public health, education, security, welfare for the elderly, welfare for the juvenile, and employment support.