To Know or Not To Know: The Question of How Much Information Is Right for the Public

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Renée Cardarelle
March 3, 2025

How much information is enough for the public is a question public administrators often grapple with. Most members of the public do not want to hear all the details of any given decision, but problems can arise when the public does not have enough information. This can be especially true when the public decision is highly visible or expensive. Many a public administrator has been blindsided by public resistance to a decision which was already in the implementation stage. As one city administrator stated, “a lot of times the public does not understand, react or get that this (decision) is happening until they see dirt moving, right?” This can result in a flurry of reaction from the public at the very end of a project when it can be too late to have any impact. To avoid this, public administrators often find themselves trying to identify how much information will help the public understand the decisions being made without overwhelming them.

Communication of the decision making process is further complicated by the public’s lack of understanding and apathy toward our complex governing systems. Instead of engaging in the process, the public tends to rely on snap judgements based on their own personal perspective and fails to realize the hidden nuisances. This tendency of the public to use heuristics—mental shortcuts which simplify complex systems and processes—makes communication all the more difficult. As a result, public administrators often find themselves trying to explain these complicated governing decisions to an impatient, self-focused and uninformed public all while highlighting the community-wide perspective

One way to mitigate this is for public administrators to develop their skills at building messaging which uses these same mental shortcuts. Simple, clear messaging can help the public understand the situation from a community-wide perspective and avoid communication which is bogged down by details. By using heuristics to help people build a simple picture of the public decision making process, public administrators can craft an effective message which resonates with the community. However, this process isn’t easy. The public administrator has to sort out which details are important to include and which can be left out. The message has to move people beyond transactional, personally focused decisions, to ones which build a common vision. Then the administrator needs to figure out how to get that message out to the public.

In crafting this message, the public administrator must also avoid the pitfall of trying to convince the public to accept an already determined decision. The best public decision making gathers public input before the decision has been made and doesn’t attempt to push decisions made by a few onto the rest of the public. Rather than selling a decision, the focus should be on crafting a message centered on factors which have to be considered when making the decision. What legal protocols need to be followed? How does this impact different members of the public? What community goals or needs is this decision going to address.

This last piece, community goals and needs, is key to crafting a simple, clear message. When the community has already identified a set of community-wide goals, these goals guide other decisions down the road. If a clear set of community goals is lacking, the focus can be on the community’s most important needs, although effort should be made to consider the entire community, not just the needs of a few (e.g.: the needs of business owners only). The more the goals and needs are embedded in a firm understanding of the community as a whole, the better the message and the more it will resonate with the public. Each decision made thereafter can refer back to these base goals or needs. For example, “Why do we need to make sure the new playground is accessible? Because our community has a goal of making our public services welcoming to all.”

The public does not need or want an endless stream of information from its governing systems. What it is looking for are clear explanations of why some decisions are being made over other decisions. It wants to make sense of a complicated system which it doesn’t understand and often doesn’t want to participate in. It’s probably not realistic to think the public is ever going to be fully invested in understanding our governing systems. Community members will probably always to some degree rely on heuristics, or simplified models of what the governing process should be. Public administrators can use heuristics to their advantage by crafting simple yet powerful messages based on common community goals and needs. These messages should avoid overloading the public with information while containing the key pieces needed to help them understand and make effective decisions.

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Author: Renée Cardarelle has a PhD in Management and Public Service from Hamline University with a focus on public participation in the governing process. In addition to her work in academia, Renée has also worked in the nonprofit sector and in grassroots organizing for more than twenty years.

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