Are citizens always right? Investigating why citizens’ inputs are notalways beneficial to public services co-production

The modern public management practices strongly rely on citizens’ involvement in co-producing public services during all the steps of the process including: service planning - service delivery - measuring service performance. As particularly regards service planning (or design), several studies have demonstrated the potential of using citizens’ inputs to enhance services quality. On the other side a few scholars and practitioners have questioned the idea according to which citizens’ suggestions necessarily lead to the optimization of the service level for the local community as a whole. In other terms, according to this view, citizens are not always right, since their views are often partial and affected by short-terminism. The purpose of this paper is to give a contribution to this stream of research by investigating local government administrators’ and elected officials’ view on this point and by assessing its impact on the actual level of co-production practices within local governments. To explore this issue this paper presents the results both of a qualitative research involving 5 Italian local governments and of a mail survey conducted among a sample of 204 Italian local governments. The findings underline the existence of several criticisms against citizens’ involvement in service design and the link between these attitudes and the actual level of co-production within local governments.