The process of service liberalization has been severely criticized, as it is thought this shift has mainly advantaged strong and well-educated citizens and led to a ''two-track'' public service, where the wealthiest, best-informed and most assertive customer get the best quality service. In this paper we examine whether this assumption holds true by analyzing Eurobarometer data of reported complaint behavior towards liberalized services in 20 EU member countries.
If this assumption of a two-track service is correct, we would see divergent citizen behaviors between potentially vulnerable and strong citizens-as-customers across different regulatory regimes. Or in other words, the degree of ‘discrimination’ of lower socio-economic status groups would differ for different degrees of liberalization.
We test this hypothesis by using Eurobarometer public opinion data on services of general interest from 2006. In doing so, we will run a multilevel logit model with reported compliant behavior as dependent variable (for each of the following sectors: electricity, gas, water, telecommunications and transport).
