Bureaucratic characteristics and citizen trust in civil service in OECD member nations

Abstract

Do various bureaucratic characteristics explain different levels of public trust in civil service? While studies have suggested various desirable traits for public administration in democratic societies, including political responsiveness, representativeness, and professionalism, their possible linkages to public evaluations of government bureaucracies are insufficiently investigated. This article examines how such attributes are related to citizens’ evaluations of civil service using a multilevel analysis across 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member nations. The bureaucratic characteristics are measured using data from the Quality of Government (QoG) Expert Survey and the OECD statistics. The survey data from the 2004 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) are used to capture individual perceptions of public administration. The empirical results show that levels of citizens’ trust in bureaucracies is higher when an impartial and gender representative public administration exists. The findings contribute to our understanding of the correlates of public trust in government agencies, as well as consequences of emphasizing different bureaucratic traits across nations.

Institutional quality, corruption, and impartiality: the role of process and outcome for citizen trust in public administration in 173 European regions

“…Building on this research, Choi (2018) finds that impartiality is one of the most important drivers of citizens' perceptions of public administration in the OECD. At the same time, a number of studies have found clear evidence that citizens' trust in public services and public administration is negatively related to the level of corruption (Anderson & Tverdova, 2003;Dahlström, Lapuente, & Teorell, 2012;Houston & Harding, 2013;Van Ryzin, 2015).…”

“…Analyses on continental subgroups, which have been mainly performed for European and Asian countries, suffer from small numbers of countries, thereby reducing the number of variables that can be included at level 2 in multilevel models. Yet, most analyses about the citizen perspective on public administration have focused on the national level, because more extensive data did not (yet) exist (Choi, 2018;Houston et al, 2016;Rölle, 2009;Van Ryzin, 2011).…”

“…We build and extent current research on the relation between institutional quality and citizen trust in public administration and services in two ways. First, earlier work on trust in public administration and its determinants has focused on single countries (see e.g., del Pino, Calzada, and Díaz-Pulido 2016; Rego, Sarrico, and Moreira 2006;Rölle 2009;Vigoda-Gadot and Yuval 2004;Yackee and Lowery 2005) but increasingly, scholars have started doing cross-national studies as well (Choi, 2018;Houston, Aitalieva, Morelock, & Shults, 2016;Van Ryzin, 2011). Yet, most studies lack a sufficient number of level-2 units (countries or geographic units) thereby severely limiting the number of country-level predictors on institutional quality that can statistically be included in the analysis, and reducing the robustness of the findings.…”

“…Yet, most studies lack a sufficient number of level-2 units (countries or geographic units) thereby severely limiting the number of country-level predictors on institutional quality that can statistically be included in the analysis, and reducing the robustness of the findings. The data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which has been used in most attempts to measure and explain variation in trust in the civil service (see recently e.g., Choi 2018;Houston et al 2016; Van Ryzin 2011), only has data for 33 countries, spread across the globe.…”

In Bureaucrats we Trust? Good Governance and Trust in Civil Servants

“…Building on this notion that process matters, recent research points to the importance of an impartial civil service as a key source of trust. Relying on survey data from the 2004 ISSP, Choi (2018) finds that the impartiality of government workers, as measured by experts, enhances levels of trust in civil servants. Similarly, in their study of 173 regions nested within the European Union, Van de Walle and Migchelbrink (2020) find that survey respondents' perceptions of higher institutional quality, greater bureaucratic impartiality, and an absence of corruption are positively associated with trust in public administration.…”