This thesis provides an alternative view on the Quality of Government (QoG) framework. The current norm within this framework is that impartiality in bureaucrats’ decision-making leads to better...Show moreThis thesis provides an alternative view on the Quality of Government (QoG) framework. The current norm within this framework is that impartiality in bureaucrats’ decision-making leads to better governmental outcomes because citizens perceive the government institutions to be more effective. Based on criticisms of this framework, this thesis provides an alternative metric of decision-making for street-level bureaucrats; equity: decision-making by government officials that temporarily favors members of marginalized groups in society over people that come from a privileged group in society with the purpose of creating more equality amongst societal groups. It is hypothesized that equity affects citizens’ perceptions of governmental institutions in four ways: (1) it increases the suitability of decisions made by street-level bureaucrats to the individual cases, (2) it increases the accessibility of public institutions to citizens, (3) it decreases the predictability of a requests’ outcome and (4) it decreases the timeliness with which is responded to citizens’ requests. Based on these four hypotheses, the general expectation is that equity creates a better citizen perception of governmental institutions. To test this, an exploratory small-N comparative case study is made in which the Dutch SVB and Allowance of the Dutch Tax Department are compared. The aim is to provide scholars with a more nuanced understanding of the QoG framework and for practitioners to have a wider tool-set available which they can use to provide services to citizens.Show less
