All Marketing Is Local: Using Support Theory to Examine Perceptions of Local Government

摘要

One of the primary concerns facing local governments is how to make citizens more aware of the broad variety of services that they provide. Despite the increasing use of marketing and other promotional techniques by local governments, citizens are often unaware of the many services that local government provides, or feel that many of these services are not representative of their needs. The current research uses concepts from support theory to examine the perceptions that individuals have toward the services provided by local government. Three studies examine support theory's tenets of availability and representativeness as they relate to the provision of governmental services. In addition, we extend support theory by demonstrating that individuals high in need for cognitive closure make greater probabilistic assessments of a given event when highly representative information occurs in the first position of the event's partition.