SPA Provost Associate Professor Nathan Favero and coauthors Mads Thau (Institute for Social Research) and Maria Falk Mikkelsen (Danish Center for Social Science Research) have published a study examining public attitudes towards a major performance failure, an embezzlement scandal, within the Danish National Board of Social Services. Their findings were surprising: despite widespread public outrage, user satisfaction remained unaffected. Published in Public Administration Review, their results challenge how organizational performance shapes public perception, and suggest that citizens’ judgments are far more resilient than believed.

Renowned for its low-corruption/high-trust society, Denmark invests heavily in public services and infrastructure, making it an interesting study context. A large-scale satisfaction survey was already underway when the news broke, creating a rare “natural experiment.” The ability to pinpoint the exact timing of the scandal strengthened confidence in the study's conclusions, minimizing the influence of other variables and highlighting the link between performance failure and user satisfaction in an authentic, high-stakes context.

“It's so helpful to have this shock to the system in the middle of data collection,” said Favero. “Causality is so hard to get at in social science, when so many things tend to be going on in the world at once.”

Google search trends confirmed broad, deep national awareness of the scandal. Even so, and though conventional wisdom would predict a drop in user satisfaction, the study found no negative effects of the performance failure. This null finding calls into question the expectancy-disconfirmation model (EDM), a dominant theory in the citizen satisfaction literature that sets expectations as a key anchor for evaluating new performance information. In the real world, where citizens draw on diverse information sources, the impact of a single negative event on satisfaction might be too weak to notice.

Favero joined the paper late in the process, to add expertise in citizen satisfaction and to help engage with and critique the EDM. “It can be hard to critique existing models without angering reviewers,” he admitted. “For a long time, I have believed that the EDM focus on expectations is a bit misplaced. Expectations probably matter to people's satisfaction, but not to the extent that they've taken up space in our literature.”

He prefers the Bayesian model of evaluation, in which people combine old and new pieces of information about an organization to create an updated judgement.

“This strikes me as more descriptive of the processes people use to evaluate organizations,” said Favero. “In other words, it may not be so much a matter of prior expectations driving satisfaction as prior experiences. If people have many prior experiences with an organization, they may form entrenched attitudes that are not easily altered by one or two new experiences."

For public administrators seeking to measure user satisfaction and organizational performance, the study offers a practical recommendation: don’t expect numeric survey results to tell the whole story. Rather, combine quantitative surveys with qualitative insights gleaned from open-ended questions. Favero also stressed the importance of using satisfaction data to identify areas for improvement or further inquiry, rather than for punitive measures.

Favero leads wider efforts to establish clearer guidelines for analyzing and publishing null results. His blog emphasizes the critical role of storytelling and strong theoretical grounding when presenting null outcomes.

“Because null results are so hard to publish, the storytelling piece matters even more than normal,” he said. “It was really important that we had a clear narrative here, and that's not always emphasized in the way we're trained with social science.”

Favero expressed gratitude for the journal reviewers and editors who recognized the value of publishing such unexpected results, contributing to a broader academic discussion about the importance of acknowledging what doesn't happen.

“A lot of people give lip service to this notion that we need to be publishing null results, but [struggle] to achieve it,” he explained. “I'm glad to have made some progress on that, and to help make it easier for other people to do so.”