Concerns for restoring citizens' trust in government are at the core of public sector modernization. Public distrust is often blamed on the bad functioning of public services, and in political discourse well-functioning public services are said to create trust in government. This is a very rational and mechanistic reasoning, only part of which corresponds to reality. The link between performance and trust can only be made when very specific conditions are present. The core of the discussion deals with causality: it is obvious that performance of the public administration has a certain impact on trust in government, but existing levels of trust in government may also have an impact on perceptions of government performance. In this article, we outline a framework for research on this performance-trust relation.

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We examine the relationship between a range of new public management (NPM) practices and citizens' perceptions of service efficiency, responsiveness, equity and effectiveness in English local governments. We find that public-private relationships have a negative relationship with citizens' perceptions of all four dimensions of local service performance, but an entrepreneurial strategic orientation exhibits a positive association with all four. Performance management is also likely to positively influence rather than negatively influencing citizens' perceptions of local public services. Further analysis revealed that the impact of NPM practices varies according to the level of socio-economic disadvantage confronted by local governments.

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 practitionersThis 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.