Ethos Perspectives

Public Governance and Public Trust — Part 2

The July 2008 issue of Ethos Perspectives explored the topic of "Public Governance and Public Trust". It featured studies in US, Europe, Australia and China, pointing to a decline in citizens’ trust in government and parallel fall in government performance, suggesting a causal relationship between the two. However, even when government performance actually improved, as was demonstrated in the case of New Zealand, trust in government had also dipped. The New Zealand study proposed that the inverse relationship could be due to rising public expectations of government, and media’s propensity to focus on scandals and lapses involving government there, thereby reinforcing negative perceptions of the New Zealand government. That issue of Ethos Perspectives concluded by consolidating suggestions for governments to improve citizens’ trust: maintain high level of service delivery, promote openness and transparency, provide citizens with avenues to participate in decision-making, and build up an image of trustworthiness through adherence to ethical standards and values such as integrity and incorruptibility.

This issue of Ethos Perspectives provides an update of some recent articles on trust in the public sector which could offer food for thought in our context. Van de Walle, Van Roosbroek and Bouckaert, after reviewing wide-ranging studies on public trust, questioned whether trust in government has really consistently declined across the world. ¹ Even if public trust should be in decline, Bouckaert and Halligan, believing government performance had been on the ascendancy, wondered whether this could result from changing government-citizen relationship brought about by public sector reforms. ² While trust levels in Norway mirrored those of other studies, more remarkable is Christensen and Laegreid’s observation that trust in one institution was projected across government. ³ The survey by the Israeli Knesset on twenty-one legislatures around the world, probably a first in cross-country comparison of a particular national institution, was remarkable in its compilation of wide-ranging efforts to improve citizens’ trust and revelations in the effects of these trust-restoration measures. ⁴ Finally, Tan and Wang offered a sampling — albeit a limited one — of public opinion on national institutions in Singapore. ⁵ For those who want a more in-depth understanding of public trust, Blind provides a comprehensive summary of issues involving ‘trust’, general trends in countries which have been surveyed, and suggestions to improve public trust. ⁶

When Trust Becomes an Issue
Van de Walle, Van Roosbroek and Bouckaert ¹ were concerned by reports of worldwide decline in trust in government and public services. They trawled through a wide array of data used in various studies and discovered that survey findings, apart from being too diverse in scopes across countries to be meaningfully compared, actually showed fluctuations in the levels of trust rather than consistent declines. Mapping some of the data to context and timing, they reasoned that trust in government had so dominated political discourse (at least in US and Europe) because the issue was thrust into the political and social arenas. They cited as examples Belgium and the Netherlands, where trust in the public sector began to feature when gaps between citizens and government became more pronounced. "It therefore seems we can treat ‘trust in government’, or better – distrust, as a phenomenon that first has to be put on the agenda before it starts to influence the polls", argued the authors. As a result, rather than seeking for reasons for citizens’ distrust, it may be more useful to explore why citizens’ trust in government and the public sector became an issue on the political and social agenda at a certain moment, and why it does not at other moments.

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