CAUSES OF BAD PUBLIC SERVICE
Public service is an integral part of any governmental agency or bureau. However, looking for a public servant that gives quality public service will often take time, effort and money.
One reason why these public employees lack the motivation to give a satisfactory customer service to citizens is lack of incentives. Incentives propel employees to give their best. The collective reasoning is that they get paid minimum wage, they produce minimum effort in the performance of their daily tasks.
Sometimes, the cause is inadequate staffing. This might be caused by absences, tardiness, or departmental cost-cutting scheme. If this happens, the length of time it takes for a transaction to finish is usually long. Even if the public employee has rendered good service in the performance of his duties, to the customer involved, the service in its totality is still bad. It may also be that the public representative is so rushed and harassed especially if the queue is quite long that the tendency is for the representative to dispose of the citizen as speedily as possible. At other times, there is simply no available representative at all and the citizen has to go back again at a later time or day.
It might also be that the bureau or the agency might either suffer from a lack of equipment or equipments that are not fitted to the demands of the department. Waiting time is the most affected. Documents might get lost or un-upgraded equipments might malfunction.
Other times, lack of training causes bad public service. Depending on the country’s financial status and the budget allocated for each governmental sector, the priority level of customer service trainings might either be on top or at the bottom. However, studies show that public service also has an impact on the development of a country’s economy.
The culture and mores within a bureaucracy influence neophytes in the bureau to adapt the same thinking and work ethics.
On a grander scale, we can rate public officials through their capability and trustworthiness. Capability is the competence to determine and act on an objective at the least social cost. Trustworthiness is a trait that guides a politician to execute his duties to the citizens and the nation without asking for kickbacks, bribes, or other forms of inducer.
One theory why they seem to have similar behavior characteristics or character traits is because low-rate citizens, or those citizens who are dishonest, will likely choose political life as they can obtain more and higher rewards as public officials. On the other hand, high-rate citizens are those people who will lose more if they will give up their private practices and will gain less if they will hold a public office. As it is, voters do not really have a wide margin as to who to choose when voting.
However, on the chance that high-rate citizens will run for office, tendency is for voters to choose this candidate over low-rate citizens. Since the latter type of citizens far outnumber the former, politics is said to be composed of people with same traits and tendencies to favor the population with the same kind and type of public service.
The second theory deals with the manipulation of current politician with regards to the rewards of the next batch of public officials. They can determine compensation package and/or they can be proactive by hiring their own bureaucrats. High-rate politicians will go for policies that will provide the most impact to future public officials while low-rate officials are focused only on policies that will promote their chances of being re-elected. Again, since the latter is the majority, then policies and regulations that are created are mostly policies supported by low-rate officials that will sustain their re-election or the re-election of an ally in the future.
According to the statement of Wittman, 1989, [i]behind every model of government failure is an assumption of extreme voter stupidity, serious lack of competition, or excessively high negotiation/transfer costs. Conversely, a study showed that voters are knowledgeable on the qualities of the candidates they vote for but they are forced to elect low-rate ones due to lack of high-rate candidates.
[i] Personal.lse.ac.uk
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