Are Citizens Responsive to the Regulatory State? The Effect of Regulation on Evaluations of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

ABSTRACT Public service delivery has increasingly involved mixed markets, with for‐profit, not‐for‐profit, and government‐delivered programs. In such contexts, regulation can protect the public interest by enhancing safety, expanding consumer choice, or improving the quality of goods or services. In this article, we explore how citizens experience varying regulated markets, and whether regulatory stringency shapes citizen perceptions of service quality in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in the United States. We rely on automated textual analysis of online Google reviews of ECEC alongside a dataset of state policy stringency that tracks whether states allow for unlicensed care environments. Using a regression discontinuity design to test the impact of regulatory systems on reviews of care, we find evidence that parents in states with less stringent regulations are more likely to post negative reviews and express anger and anxiety, relative to parents in states with robust regulatory regimes.