Spoken administrative language is a critical element in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions between officials and citizens during the delivery of public services. But preceding work offers little insights on the verbal features of street-level bureaucracy. Drawing on communication studies, we argue that administrative language differs along both a relational and an informational linguistic component. To test the consequentiality of this theory, we design a factorial survey experiment with a representative sample of 1,402 German citizens. Participants evaluated audio recordings of a hypothetical service encounter where we systematically varied the language used by the official and the service decision, measuring participants’ service satisfaction as the main outcome. Based on regression analysis, we find that relational elements of administrative language improve citizen satisfaction, independent of the service outcome, but that the effect does not hold for the informational component. These findings emphasize the importance of relational communication in citizen-state interactions, which tends to be neglected in public administration theory and practice.

中文翻译：

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公共服务遭遇的语言特征：口头行政语言如何影响公民满意度

行政口头语言是公民与国家之间关系的关键要素，尤其是在公共服务提供过程中涉及官员与公民之间的面对面互动时。但之前的工作对街头官僚机构的语言特征提供了很少的见解。根据传播学研究，我们认为行政语言在关系语言和信息语言成分上都有所不同。为了检验这一理论的后果，我们设计了一个包含 1,402 名德国公民的代表性样本的因子调查实验。参与者评估了假设的服务遭遇的录音，我们系统地改变了官员使用的语言和服务决策，衡量参与者的服务满意度作为主要结果。基于回归分析，我们发现行政语言的相关元素提高了公民满意度，与服务结果无关，但这种效果不适用于信息成分。这些发现强调了关系沟通在公民与国家互动中的重要性，而这在公共行政理论和实践中往往被忽视。