Polarization and Partisan Bias in Citizens’ Evaluations of Public Services

Abstract Evidence of partisan bias questions the ability of citizens to form meaningful judgments of the functioning of government and hold the government accountable. Existing work demonstrates that incumbent and opposition supporters consistently diverge in their evaluation of government performance regarding the national economy, security, and highly polarized policy issues. We argue that in a polarized environment, partisan bias applies not only to citizens’ evaluations of macro-policy outcomes but also to citizens’ evaluations of mundane tangible public services, such as education, health, policing, and transportation. We provide rigorous empirical evidence for this hypothesis using the case of Israel during the two dramatic, hyper-polarized government changes in 2021 and 2022. The data include two repeated cross-sectional survey datasets: A large seven-wave survey study and an administrative survey dataset by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. Our robust findings question the ability of citizens to hold their government accountable for public service performance, a fundamental feature of democratic theory.