Image of Trust in the public sector: is there any evidence for a long-term decline?

Journal Articles

Trust in the public sector: is there any evidence for a long-term decline?

Concerns with declining public trust in government have become a permanent element of the contemporary
political discourse. This concern also extends to levels of citizens' trust in the public administration and public services.
Trust is said to be declining, and this decline is generally seen as detrimental to public service delivery. In this article,
we examine the main elements in this discussion, review the existing international survey data and summarize the main findings for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Citizens' trust in the public sector is found to fluctuate, and the data generally do not show consistently declining levels of trust. Furthermore, in some countries there simply are insufficient data to come to any conclusions at all about time trends in citizen trust in the public sector.

Points for practitioners

This article summarizes some of the survey material on citizens' trust in the public administration. It allows practitioners to compare trends in public trust in their country across time and space. The findings lead us to reject the hypothesis of a universal decline of trust in the public sector. The article warns against using opinion poll results without considering context. The long-term and comparative perspective on citizens' trust in the public sector is all too often absent from the policy discourse that is frequently based on assumptions and ad hoc approaches.

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Detail Information
Series Title
International Review of Administrative Sciences
Call Number
-
Publisher
California : Sage Publications.,
Collation
-
Language
English
ISBN/ISSN
0020-8523
Classification
-
Content Type
-
Media Type
-
Carrier Type
-
Edition
Vol. 74, No. 1, Page 47-64
Subject(s)
Public opinion
citizen—government relations
comparative public administration
trust in government
Specific Detail Info
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Statement of Responsibility
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