Research has accumulated strong evidence that citizens’ experience of public services relative to their expectations determines their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with these services: If the experience is better than expected, citizens will be satisfied; if the experience is worse than expected, citizens will be dissatisfied. Expectations vary in their abstractness. Based on construal level theory from psychology, we propose that more abstract expectations (associated with a high construal, idealized mental state)are less likely to be met than concrete expectations (associated with a low construal state that takes into account the context), and therefore associated with a higher level of dissatisfaction for equivalent experiences with public services. In May 2014, we will conduct a survey of the general adult population of the Guadalajara, Mexico metropolitan area in order to test this idea. The survey will include a survey experiment, whereby one randomly assigned half of respondents will be asked (and primed to think) about empirical expectations, which we consider to be more concrete, and the other half of respondents will be asked (and primed to think) about normative expectations, which we consider to be more abstract. Other things equal, we expect satisfaction to be lower in the latter group.