Performance Matters: Linking Performance, Warmth and Trust in Government

• In Event: Information, Performance Outcomes, and Change in the Public Sector

Abstract

Trust in government is crucial to good democratic governance. Yet, trust in government is under attack by populist movements articulating how government cannot be trusted and citizens follow this trend by displaying a declining trust in government (Pew 2017). As government legitimacy and public service provision depends on citizens' trust, it constitutes one of the biggest current challenges (Kettl 2017, Cooper et al. 2008).

It is often suggested that trust in government in part may be explained by the quality or perceptions of how well the public sector performs (e.g., Van de Walle et al. 2008). Indeed, the idea that better government performance leads to greater trust in government is a core element in strategies to address the crisis of trust (Boswell 2018). However, empirical studies yield mixed results and scholars question the link between public service performance and trust in government (Van de Walle and Bouckaert 2003). This literature has not considered how performance affects trust in different governmental institutions. Rather “government” is treated as an encompassing term that can refer to different institutions such as national government or a specific public organization. Likewise, regarding measurement, it is often imprecise what is meant by “government”, allowing the application of different foci (Citrin and Stoker 2018). When we talk about the performance of public sector organizations, it might not affect trust in e.g., the national government but it could relate to trust in other parts of government more closely related to public service performance (Yang and Holzer 2006). If we do not make a clear distinction between different governmental institutions, we may not be able to demonstrate the performance-trust link. In this article, I therefore ask whether public service performance has a stronger impact on trust in some governmental institutions than in others.

Theoretically, I propose a model for how performance of public organizations affects trust in government. The model divides “government” into two dimensions; one covering political institutions and one covering the administrative part including public organizations. I argue that public service performance primarily affect citizens’ trust in the administrative part of government rather than trust in the political part of government. Still it might not in particular be the exact evaluation of public service performance that affects trust in government. Within social psychology an impressive body of literature (Fiske et al. 2002, 2007) has demonstrated that individuals not only form impressions based on performance evaluations (referred to as competence in social psychology literature), but also based on evaluations of warmth, which refers to intentions (e.g., helpfulness). In a public-sector context, these insights suggest that citizens’ evaluations of the public sector are not solely based on their perception of public sector performance (or competence). For example, it is possible to form a positive impression of public service delivery independent of a competence/performance evaluation. As warmth evaluations are strongly linked to trustworthiness (Fiske et al. 2007), this type of evaluation might even have a stronger effect on trust in government than competence-based evaluations. On this background, I furthermore study the effect of warmth-based evaluations and whether they even outperform competence/performance-based evaluations in predicting citizens' trust in government.

Methodologically, I contribute to an improved understanding of the performance-trust link by using a survey-experimental design. This design secures the direction of causal influence between perceptions of performance and trust in government, which is uncertain if we use subjective cross-sectional data. A representative sample of 1,200 Danish citizens and an Amazon Mturk sample of 800 American citizens constituted the empirical basis of the study. To measure perceptions of the public sector along the competence/performance and warmth dimension, respectively, subjects were randomly assigned to either a [i] high competence, [ii] low competence, [iii] high warmth or [iv] low warmth condition. To evoke these attributes in respondents’ perceptions of the public sector, subjects were primed to think about an experience with the public sector focusing on the randomly assigned feature (e.g., high competence).

Preliminary results indicate that [a], in accordance with the model, perceptions of public service performance shape citizens' trust in the administrative part of government while it does not explain trust in the political part, and [b] that warmth-related evaluations do not affect trust in government to the same degree as performance-related evaluations. Interestingly, the preliminary results indicate that the two universal dimensions of social cognition are related, since perceptions of warmth are linked positively to perceptions of competence.

Author

• Frederik Godt, Aarhus University