Two track public services? Citizens' voice behaviour towards liberalized services in the EU15

Abstract

Is there evidence for the emergence of ‘two-track’ public services, where the wealthiest, best- informed and most assertive customers get the best quality service? In this paper, we use public opinion data of citizen complaint behavior from 2000 and 2004 towards services of general interest in 15 EU countries to provide a first examination of the ‘two-track’ public services hypothesis. The findings only partly support the expectation that socio-economic factors did have a negative impact over time on citizen complaints. While education did not have such an effect, age did. However, these results should be regarded as provisional for various reasons