How Policy Instruments Shape Recipients’ Evaluations of Service: The Case of Housing Policy for Military Personnel in Korea

Abstract Many governments have implemented indirect policy instruments as an alternative to direct instruments for providing public services. However, the effectiveness of the instruments from the perspective of recipients has not yet been compared in depth in the literature. This study investigates the recipients’ evaluation of the differences between public housing and housing vouchers, which were exogenously assigned by the government to recipients, using ordered logit and generalized ordered logit models to analyze data collected in 2019 from Korean military personnel. The findings indicate that the evaluations of the services delivered by housing vouchers were more positive than those of public housing, and the magnitude of the difference between evaluations varied according to the attributes of the household decision makers and the rural or urban location of the leased house. These findings provide empirically grounded contributions to the selection of policy instruments and uncover the contexts in which each policy instrument may be implemented for the best effect.