Perception of Public Administration – Public Opinion Survey

Citizens do not make a big distinction between state and local administration, and higher percentage of the citizens rate public administration with negative scores than positive ones. On average they rate it 5 on the scale from 1 to 10. There are no differences between the citizens who had the opportunity to communicate with public administration during the past 12 months and those who did not. More than a half of the citizens do not see any change in the quality of public services during the past 3 years. Among the citizens who state that the quality of services has changed there is a similar percentage of those who perceive improvement of the quality of services and those who think that the quality of services has worsened. Higher percentage of the citizens state that they trust public administration, among whom those with elementary education are in the lead, and the least trusting citizens are the unemployed. One in four citizens had prior experience with public administration. With the increase of educational attainment and income also increases the likelihood that the citizens had experience with state and local administration. The citizens state that they mainly had contact with municipality and police units, followed by tax administration, courts and Cadastre.

The citizens perceive as the biggest problems of public administration: irregular employment, inefficiency of public administration and corruption. They also mention inadequate work of public servants, but also the size of public servants apparatus. They see as the best solutions decrease of corruption, increase of internal control in public administration and stricter punitive measures. Nevertheless, somewhat higher percentage of the citizens think that the Government will not manage to fight these problems until 2020 compared to those who think that it will manage to do this. Majority of citizens think that the public administration budget is used for wrong purposes, whereas the citizens who had some experience with public administration during the past 12 months are more convinced in this. According to the citizens, the most important factors in finding employment are connections (family and friends), but crucial factor are political connections. Education, skills and experience of the candidate are in the third place according to the citizens.

Citizens have a moderate attitude towards the services of public administration, where similar percentage of the citizens are satisfied and dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction with the services is the result of inefficiency in solving the requests, long waiting in lines, necessity to use connections in order to solve the request and complex procedures. One in two citizens thinks that the requests are solved too slowly. As regards the prices of the services, the opinions are divided. On the other hand, the citizens mainly do not know how they could make complaints about the work of public administration, so very small percentage of them have filed complaints in recent years.

The majority of citizens are not informed about public debates organised by public administration bodies, so one in four citizens claims to have followed some public debate organised by public administration.

Just one in ten citizens visited Internet presentation of some public administration body during the past 12 months, and even smaller percentage of them visited the eGovernment portal (one in four citizens heard about this portal). Among users of Internet presentation, the percentage of citizens who are satisfied with the contents of the presentation exceeds the percentage of those who are not satisfied with it. Satisfaction is smaller only in terms of regular updating of contents of presentations. Citizens who haven’t used the websites of public administration mainly claim that they had no need for it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *