Recognizing this variation, the Ministry of Finance has published a comprehensive dashboard with multiple statistics pertaining to the quality of work undertaken by local governments across the country. The dashboard aims to support citizens in better understanding the quality of life in their locality relative to the rest of the country and serve as an input for local officials’ decisions about the course of future policies in their municipality.
But to what extent are all Estonian’s happy? And to what extent does the quality of local services relate to that happiness? In summer 2021, the World Bank, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, conducted a survey of citizens relating to their satisfaction with their living environment, local public services, and the authorities in their local municipality.
The main message of the survey is that the Estonians are predominantly satisfied with their life in their local area. Figures below show the overall results for some of the questions in the survey. When asked ‘How satisfied are you with your local government as a place to live?’, 62% of respondents indicated that they are either rather or very satisfied. A slightly smaller share of 54% said that they are satisfied with services provided by their local government, with further 21% choosing the neutral ‘neither satisfied or dissatisfied’ option. It is therefore understandable that over half (53%) of Estonians indicate that their current municipality is their preferred place of living in Estonia.
Estonians are not quite so happy with the functioning of their local authorities, despite the fact that they mainly enjoy living there. Just below half (47%) say that their local council acts on the concerns of local residents to a ‘fair’ or ‘great’ extent, but barely a quarter (26%) feel their own priorities are reflected by the decisions of local policymakers. The feelings of limited responsiveness of local authorities translates into Estonians’ views of their performance. Half or less of Estonians agree that their local council is doing a good job (50%), is efficient and well-run (43%), and provides good value for money (40%).
These views can be considered as well-informed, given a relatively high engagement of the Estonians with their local governments. 45% of survey respondents indicated that they had contacted a representative of the local government in the past 12 months, either to seek service and information, or make a complaint. An even higher level of familiarity with local government functioning is indicated by the fact that 66% of respondents said they could name at least one local councilors and the number of local councilors known by a median Estonian was four.
Such findings underline the importance of the Ministry of Finance’s policy dashboard. The dashboard hopes to generate robust discussions about what exactly it is that local governments are doing well, what it could do better, and how those views can be communicated to local authorities. By providing objective benchmarks regarding local government performance, the dashboard provides a way of identifying what it is about the performance of the local government that might require a reform.
Demographic differences
The survey responses differ depending on who we ask. People’s background, like their gender, age, or ethnicity might impact the way they experience local environment and their assessment of local authorities. However, as figure below shows, in the survey we didn’t observe large differences along those lines. Few differences stand between the way in which female and male respondents answered our 10 questions about different dimensions of local government functioning. Across the three broad age categories there are similarly few large differences, with an exception of moderately smaller share of the young respondents (16-34 years old) feeling that their interests are adequately represented, preferring to live in their current municipality, and knowing their local councilors. The largest differences are observed for different ethnicities, with people who declare themselves as Russian, having almost uniformly lower satisfaction levels than the Estonians or people of ‘Other’ ethnicities. However, given that only few hundred Russians filled the survey and only few dozen people declared their ethnicity as ‘Other’, those differences might be less robust that those observed across gender and age categories.
Survey details
The survey was conducted online, between June and October of 2021. In total, a sample of 7,219 people from across 76 municipalities provided their responses to a two-part survey. In the first part, the respondents were able to express the feelings about their local governments, including aspects such as efficiency and responsiveness of the policy-makers. In the second part, they could use a novel survey tool, called quadratic voting for survey research (QVSR), and assume the role of local policymakers to decide how to distribute a ‘budget’ of votes for future spending on 16 different types of local public services - from pre-school education, through waste management, to sports. As a decision-making tool, QVSR is increasingly attracting the attention of both academics and policy-makers (see here). The survey was concluded shortly before recent local government elections, held in October 2021. As such, its results should not be viewed not as an evaluation of the performance of the current local authorities, whose mandate started only after they survey had finished collecting citizens’ feedback. Rather, it should be seen as a potential input in deciding on reforms and new policy directions by the incoming local decision-makers.
Data is available here:
