trust in government – Jesse Campbell

Securing the trust of citizens can facilitate the delivery of high-quality public services and government has a duty to act in a trustworthy manner. However, even if public service quality is high and policy sound, if decisions are made without accountability, trust in government may suffer. Public participation can contribute to the legitimacy of the exercise of government power. Using a two-by-two vignette-based experiment embedded in a survey conducted in South Korea, I test the impact on trust in government of public participation in the policymaking process under conditions of both good and poor policy performance. The results suggest that participatory policymaking marginally increases citizen trust in government. However, they also suggest that performance is the critical factor, and that participation alone cannot reverse the trust-damaging effect of poor performance. Although this research has limitations, it also has practical implications for public managers considering involving the public in the policymaking process, particularly when the costs of doing so are non-trivial.

Graph Campbell 2023 Public participation and trust in government.

Campbell, J. W. (2023). Public participation and trust in government: Results from a vignette experiment. Journal of Policy Studies, 38(2). https://doi.org/10.52372/jps38203

Policies adopted to curb the spread of COVID-19 impose limits on individual freedom and although some citizens have consistently supported containment policy, others have resisted. Beyond political orientation, however, little research has explored the attitudinal basis of support for stringent virus containment policy. We argue that individuals with high levels of public service motivation (PSM) will more readily accept the sacrifices entailed by containment policy and thereby express stronger support for it. Second, we argue that the positive relationship between PSM and containment policy support is both mediated by trust in government and moderated by bureaucratic personality, the latter denoting a favorable orientation towards rules in general. Using a country-wide sample of 568 South Korean citizens collected in the fall of 2021, we estimate a conditional process model of support for COVID-19 policy stringency. We find that PSM has both a direct and indirect relationship with support via trust in government and that the indirect effect is moderated by bureaucratic personality, though not in the expected direction. We also report the results of a post hoc analysis which suggests interesting differences in how individuals evaluate rules that limit individual versus organizational freedom.

Ahn Campbell 2022 bureaucratic personality and public service motivation.

Ahn Campbell 2022 bureaucratic personality and public service motivation model.

Ahn Campbell 2022 bureaucratic personality and public service motivation indirect effect.

Ahn, Y., & Campbell, J. W. (2022). Who loves lockdowns? Public service motivation, bureaucratic personality, and support for Covid-19 containment policy. Public Performance & Management Review, 46(1), 86–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2022.2124296