Citizen Contribution to Local Public Services: Field Experiments in Institutions Incorporating Social Information

Citizen contributions to public goods are regarded as increasingly important by researchers and policy-makers. These include volunteering to make communities better places. The classic problem is that there are strong incentives for these goods not to be provided, which derive from social norms and competing pressures on people's time. A core idea in recent thinking in behavioural economics and the study of collective action, is that the way information is presented to citizens matters. This can include who makes the request, what social norm is conveyed, and how the behaviour of other participants is recorded. The key idea is that an external agency, what we call an institution, is capable of presenting these messages in ways that are encouraging and help citizens overcome obstacles to participating. We are particularly interested in whether recommendations from prominent people such as those in the voluntary sector can promote civic action, and whether the mentioning of politicians might have a downward effect when compared to other public figures (while being positive overall). We are interested in finding out whether conveying the social norm is important. We want to know whether the form of feedback to citizens creates more of a response. We will feedback information in different ways to examine how it enhances citizen participation. Critically, we are interested in whether the effect of social information is sustained in time or whether the effect diminishes.

Our method is the randomized controlled trial, which can isolate the effect of an intervention. The proposal will carry out experiments on two kinds of citizen action. The first is about citizen contributions to a timebank, which is about logging people's time for volunteering. We will work with ten local timebanks, seeing to recruit people by a randomly allocated letter that conveys a commendation from a prominent politician, community representative or fellow citizen. Once we have recruited these people we will monitor their attendance and activities, and see to encourage them to contribute. We will carry out a similar randomised controlled trial to recruit students to an event and to continue voluntary action. Again we test the importance of an endorsement by a politician and important person, with the idea that this person's promised own contribution to a timebank will increase contributions. Again we will monitor this by feedback, but will add an additional feature, whether a financial incentive will increase contributions or crowd them out. With these findings we will be in a position to find out what things public institutions can do to increase voluntary contributions by citizens, in particular by providing them with information that encourages the voluntary donation of time.

The beneficiaries of this research include the scientific communities interested in the provision of social information on collective goods, especially political scientists, economists and urban scholars, but there are several important groups of beneficiaries in the wider community. The beneficiaries outside the scientific communities are 1) policy-makers in UK central government, and in the devolved administrations, who are formulating policies to encourage greater involvement on the part of the citizens in making more contributions to public goods. We include here policy-makers in the Cabinet Office charged with promoting greater involvement, such as the Behavioural Insights Team (through David Halpern), and the Office for Civil Society. 2) We include national organisations that are responsible for encouraging volunteering and community action. We are working with Volunteering England, through its senior policy manager Mike Locke, which is interested in both our work stimulating volunteering for young people, and also our work on community action through Timebanks. We are working closely with NESTA - National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts - which is interested in promoting innovation in delivering citizen-based policies, and has particular remit for timebanks, and our contact is Dan James, Policy Manager. 3) Local government and locally based voluntary organisations. A range of bodies are responsible for encourage voluntary activities, such as local government, local voluntary bodies and charities, and other public organisations, such as universities. These bodies will be able to vary the institutional design elements of their organistions, which can vary how social information is conveyed to citizens, such as feedback, form of requests. The organisations will be able to learn practical results from our research and apply them their our own policies and research.

The means whereby the research will contribute to impact will be through the advisory group, contacts of the research, a twitter feed, findings put on our website, a final event in London where will invite policy makers.

Such work will enhance the impact on the increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy because of the greater focus on citizen-lead form of service delivery, which is more appropriate in times of fiscal austerity, and also when governments of all hues are seeking to get better leverage on society problems which need a citizen input as much as the involvement of professional bureaucracies.

Some of the benefits will happen during the research as the findings emerge, the rest will emerge after the main findings have been produced and disseminated. All the above impacts are consistent with the ESRC's influencing behaviour and informing interventions strategic priority, which is a key part of the current refined list of strategic priorities for the funding body.

The researchers will develop practical skills in delivering experiments which adds to the capacity of the UK to carry out this kind of method. The focus on concrete instances of the application of institutions through experimental intervention is expected to lead to direct impacts on contribution outcomes as a consequence of the research. The method allows the effect size of these impacts to be assessed such that this knowledge will enable further impact through the application of the institutions in other contexts.

Finally, the citizens themselves will benefit from being able to contribute and from being encourage to do so, as one of the problems in collective action is the individuals desired to participate but lack incentives and the supportive context in which to do so.