Perceived Government Waste and Government Structure: an Empirical Examination of Competing Explanations

This article specifies two alternative models of how government structures affect Abstract waste—the reform government movement's underlying model and the simplest version of a transactions-cost model. Key differences in the underlying assumptions of these two models are highlighted. Employing these models, estimates of the effects of government structures on perceived government waste are empirically extracted net of systematic individual specific perceptions that might be correlated with community-related perceptions. Empirical results suggest that the transactions-cost model better explains how government structures affect citizen satisfaction with local government's performance than does the reform model. The methodology developed to accomplish these tests promises to be useful in other applications.