Transparency is considered a key value for trustworthy governments. However, the effect of transparency on citizens' trust across different national cultures is overlooked in current research. This article compares the effect of transparency on trust in government between the Netherlands and South Korea. The effect is investigated by two similar series of three experiments. We hypothesize that the effect of transparency differs, because both countries have different cultural values regarding power distance and short and long-term orientation.Results reveal similar patterns in both countries: transparency has a subdued and sometimes negative effect on trust in government. However, the negative effect in South Korea is much stronger. This implies a subdued and negative effect of transparency on trust in the short term in both countries. Nevertheless, the difference in the magnitude of transparency's effect suggests that national cultural values play a significant role in how people perceive and appreciate government transparency.3

The decline of trust in government contributes to a climate of "political malaise," and leads to great challenges for any government concerned with meeting the public's demands and expectations. Starting from the premise that e-government and e-participation are desirable developments initiated by governments via a top-down approach, this paper explores the opportunities, if any, available to citizens to utilize the internet to initiate bottom-up channels of participation and communication. We explore the extent to which the time that people spend on the internet affects the public's trust in the government and/or the degree of compliance with government policies, as compared to the influence of the traditional, offline, mass media modalities, such as newspapers. The results of the analyses suggest that the more time individuals spend on the internet, the lower their degree of trust in government and lower level of citizen compliance.

Appraisals of public employees are important for a host of reasons, and particularly so with the increasing emphasis on pay-for-performance systems and performance-based management in the public sector. However, managerial appraisals of employees can be somewhat subjective and our understanding of the appraisal process in the public sector is largely U.S.-centric. In this study, we explore whether characteristics of managers, like a rater's public service motivation (PSM), affect appraisal outcomes for their subordinates. Using a mixed experimental design, we analyze these dynamics in a non-U.S. context with MBA and MPA students enrolled in one of Korea's top universities. We find that rater PSM moderates the influence of both task and non-task behavior on an employee's performance appraisal.

For the past two decades, many developing countries have begun to experiment with resultsoriented reforms to make their governments more competitive. However, very few studies explore the question of the applicability and appropriateness of Western-oriented reforms in non-Western contexts. Based on theories of new institutionalism and institutional logics, this article examines some of the organizational, cultural, and political assumptions that are implicit in Western-styled reforms; how they may conflict with the institutional contexts of many developing countries; and how the conflicts may impact reform strategies and results. The article then recommends how future comparative research can focus more on interinstitutional layering problems. It also suggests a few hypotheses for future empirical works that are interested in exploring further the dynamics between institutional gap, implementation strategies, and leadership characteristics of results-oriented reforms.