Citizen contribution to local public services - Part 3

John, Peter (2018). Citizen contribution to local public services - Part 3. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852199

Citizen contributions to public services are regarded as increasingly important by researchers and policy-makers. These include volunteering to make communities better places. 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 to their willingness to donate their time. This can include who makes the request, what information there is about what other people do, and what feedback people get about their volunteering and the activities of others. The research examined whether recommendations from prominent people, such as those in the community sector and politicians, could help promote civic action. The research also examined the effect of providing feedback about other people's time contributions. The researchers sought to identify whether varying the form of feedback to citizens matters, and used randomized controlled trials to investigate their effects on citizens' contributions to volunteering.

Data description (abstract)

This dataset relates to the ESRC Citizen Contribution to Local Public Services project. It is the third of four datasets created for this project. The project sought to identify how social information could influence volunteering levels in different groups, using four different field experiments. This dataset contains information from the third field experiment which examined the effects of an intervention designed to incorporate various social information 'nudges' - on a group of bureaucrats. The other datasets in the project (1,2,4) examine other forms of social information with different groups of people.

This dataset incorporates information about the elections, candidates and recruitment practices of parish councils holding elections in May 2015. The field experiment sought to test the effect of social information about other parishes' recruitment practices, delivered by letter and briefing sessions, as a form of social pressure and persuasion. It sought to investigate the effects of social information on parish councillor recruitment. Specifically, the study sought to identify whether social information and training provision would lead to an increase in the number of competitive (contested) elections held in parish councils, the number of candidates coming forward, the diversity of candidates and the recruitment practices of parish councils.

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