The Satisfaction of the Citizens with the Place and the Impact of This Evaluation on Local Government Management: A Comparative Study in Argentinian Cities

Background

The Tiebout Model of Local Governments (Tiebout, 1956) postulates that individuals who do not agree with all goods and services provided in a locality can improve their welfare by moving to a city that offers a satisfactory set of goods and services. This option has been called “people can vote with their feet”. By voting with their feet, individuals reveal their preferences and promote an efficient allocation of resources in the public sector. Theoretically all those who choose to live in the same community have similar preferences, and the allocation of resources is optimal in the Pareto sense.

From the point of view of the disciplines of public administration, although the Tiebout model is restrictive, it has delivered the foundation for the study of local government finance and the process of fiscal migration, through which people have constituted localities that are stratified by income level. Tiebout postulates that, given certain circumstances, people might be perceived as mobile “consumer voters”. They have a wide variety of options as to where to reside within a metropolitan region in particular and therefore will choose to settle where they find that the municipal services available to them (schools, public services, firefighters and police, etc.) are more attractive. Tiebout is an example of a policy such as “methodological individualism” that assumes that people make location decisions without restrictions based on individual preferences and self-interest, within the broader social context.

From the perspective of public administration the citizen satisfaction can be considered from their instrumental value as it helps to meet professional and institutional goals. What is measured as a general citizen satisfaction capture this utility and ultimate objective of the Government (Goodin, 1995).