Acting out or playing along: A typology of citizens' low trust responses to public organizations

Abstract

Working under the assumption that societal pockets of low trust in government are likely to proliferate, this introduction to the special issue on “governance in low‐trust settings” integrates insights from the Global South and Global North to analyze how citizens respond to formal rules and service arrangements of public organizations they perceive as untrustworthy. We develop a typology of low trust responses—submission, avoidance, gaming, and resistance—as a counterpart to the well‐established exit‐voice‐loyalty‐neglect framework. We argue that these responses follow from institutional incentives and most likely emerge where people feel the system is not fair or feel like their back is against the wall, and they have the resources to game or resist the system. This article seeks to advance theorizing on governance in low‐trust contexts and enable a better understanding of citizen responses that are inconsistent with the governance mechanisms and service provision in high trust contexts.

El apoyo a la democracia en México 2021: aproximación a su explicación

“…Levi y Stoker, 2000). La sensación de que "el sistema es justo para todos" se asocia positivamente con el cumplimiento voluntario de las reglas escritas y no escritas del gobierno y la administración (Peeters y Dussauge Laguna, 2021). Para Morales Mena (2015) el valor de la confianza política hacia las instituciones en una democracia reside en que facilita la cooperación, independientemente de las preferencias ideológico-partidistas de la ciudadanía.…”

Street-level bureaucracy in weak state institutions: a systematic review of the literature

“… Social factors , or the attitudes and characteristics of public service clients and the public at large (Brinks et al, 2020; Lameck and Hulst, 2020; Pepinsky et al, 2017). Specifically for weak institutions, relevant social factors include low social trust in government (Peeters and Dussauge Laguna, 2021), competing social institutions and norms (Masood and Nisar, 2020), high social inequality (Lotta and Pires, 2019), and high levels of violence and social conflict (Ballvé, 2012). This can lead to more dangerous frontline working conditions (Sundström, 2016), more complexity in dealing with marginalized public service clients (Bhavnani and Lee, 2018), and more citizens actively resisting (Nisar, 2018), avoiding (Chudnovsky and Peeters, 2021a), or gaming (Peeters et al, 2020) client–worker interactions. Professional factors , or the formal and informal professional norms, terms of employment (including salary, job certainty, and career possibilities), and action resources that frontline workers have at their disposal in terms of the quality and quantity of personnel, budget, and technical tools (Hupe and Buffat, 2014; Lameck and Hulst, 2020; Pepinksy et al, 2017).…”

“…Most research on street-level bureaucracy has been conducted in institutional contexts of the Global North that are generally characterized by high levels of professionalization, administrative capacity, and bureaucratic autonomy (Bertelli et al, 2020; Pepinsky et al, 2017). The vast majority of the world’s street-level bureaucrats, however, work under a very different set of institutional incentives and constraints, including highly politicized bureaucracies (Zarychta et al, 2020), precarious labor conditions (Lima and D’Asenzi, 2017), scarcity of basic resources (Gibson, 2004), systematic corruption (Justesen and Bjørnskov, 2014), and low social trust in government (Peeters and Dussauge Laguna, 2021). In this article, we take stock of the literature on street-level bureaucracy in the Global South and analyze recurring institutional factors and the way they shape frontline worker agency.…”

“…Deficiencies in the institutional preconditions for policy implementation and service provision trigger an institutional waterbed-effect , pushing these deficiencies towards the street-level where frontline workers cope with them in highly diverse ways. Thereby, we help shed light on how precarity makes frontline work in the Global South different from strong institutional settings, and, more broadly, on the often-contested nature of state-citizen interactions, the patchiness of service delivery, and the mechanisms underlying implementation and enforcement gaps (Holland, 2015; McDonnell, 2017; Peeters and Dussauge Laguna, 2021).…”

Recontextualizing street‐level bureaucracy in the developing world

“…These immediate working conditions are directly related to larger historical processes of state construction and social organization in the developing world. On the one hand, state building is often characterized by incomplete institutionalization processes amid great resource scarcity (Peeters & Dussauge Laguna, 2021). On the other hand, developing world societies, especially those bearing colonial legacies, tend to be more unequal, as elites concentrate wealth and significant proportions (sometimes the vast majority) of the population face severe levels of poverty.…”