Government Openness and Public Trust: The Mediating Role of Democratic Capacity

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Lisa Schmidthuber,Alex Ingrams,Dennis Hilgers
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13298

Research Article

Abstract: The open government paradigm implies that public processes are becoming more transparent, public

information is available online, and citizens and nongovernmental organizations are encouraged to interact

with public administration through new platform-based forms of participation and collaboration. Though these

governmental efforts to open up organizational procedures to the public are meant to strengthen the relationship

between citizens and the government, empirical evidence is currently sparse and mixed. This article argues that

positive impacts of openness depend on citizen’s democratic capacity defined as the individual sense of empowerment to

influence governmental systems. By matching individual survey data from the European Social Survey with secondary

institutional data, the authors investigate the relationship between individual- and structural-level variables. Findings

indicate that structural openness is, in general, positively associated with higher trust. Further, the effect of openness on

public trust is partially mediated by an individual’s perception that they have meaningful opportunities for political

participation.

Evidence for Practice

• Cross-national evidence shows that, in general, European countries investing in government openness

benefit from a higher level of citizen trust in the public system.

• If governments focus on satisfying citizens’ expectations regarding democratic decision-making possibilities,

they are likely to reap more rewards in terms of greater citizen trust.

• Improving citizens’ sense of empowerment to influence governmental systems helps translate openness

reforms into greater levels of citizen trust.

Much debate surrounds the effects of

unstable or declining levels of public

trust in the public sector and its

institutions (Keele2007; Kettl2019; Van de

Walle, Van Roosbroek, and Bouckaert2008).

Low or declining levels of trust are seen as one of

the main forces driving changes in government

(McNabb2009). Indeed, declining trust is

explicitly used by policymakers as a justification for

reforms that open up organizational processes to

citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and other

external actors (Chesbrough and Di Minin2014;

Grimmelikhuijsen and Feeney2017; Kim and

Lee2012; Noveck2009).

Some evidence does show that openness in terms of

information and participation can strengthen citizen

trust in the government system (e.g., Cook, Jacobs,

and Kim2010; Grimmelikhuijsen2012; Kim and

Lee2012). However, scholars such as O’Neill(2002)

and Hood(2007) argue that transparency can

create suspicion and a blame culture in government

that erodes trust. Other evidence backs up this

argumentation (e.g., Bailard2014; Grimmelikhuijsen

et al.2013; Tolbert and Mossberger2006), and

there has generally been a shift in scholarship

towards understanding the social and political

contextual conditionalities of the openness–trust

relationship (Cucciniello, Porumbescu, and

Grimmelikhuijsen2017).

The purpose of the present research is to contribute

a better, contextual understanding of the impact

of “open government” (Evans and Campos2013;

Lee and Kwak2012; Meijer, Curtin, and

Hillebrandt2012) on citizen trust in government

based on country differences in preexisting levels of

openness, and the conditional effect of democratic

capacity as individual sense of empowerment to

influence governmental systems. We probe one

particular contextual puzzle in the relationship

between democracy and openness: while open

government scholarship tends to treat these as

two complementary values, that approach appears

simplistic when we consider mixed findings that

citizens often decline to participate when they are

Lisa Schmidthuber

Alex Ingrams

Dennis Hilgers

Government Openness and Public Trust: The Mediating Role

of Democratic Capacity

Dennis Hilgers is a professor of public

and nonprofit management at the Institute

for Public and Nonprofit Management at

Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. His

research focuses on managing innovation

and performance in the public sector.

Alex Ingrams is an assistant professor

at the Institute of Public Administration,

Leiden University, the Netherlands. He

researches and teaches in areas related

to governmental transparency and public

participation, governance reforms, and the

influence of digital technologies on public

sector information management.

Email: a.r.ingrams@fgga.leidenuniv.nl

Lisa Schmidthuber is a postdoctoral

researcher at the Institute for Public

Management and Governance, Vienna

University of Economics and Business,

Austria. Her research interests include

public innovation management (open

government, citizensourcing, and open

data), digital transformation, and innovation

in accounting practices.

Email: lisa.schmidthuber@wu.ac.at

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 1, pp. 91–109. © 2020 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13298.

Vienna University of Economics and Business

Leiden University

Johannes Kepler University Linz

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. 91

92 Public Administration Review • Janua ry | F ebru ary 20 21

satisfied that government is sufficiently open (Hibbing and Theiss-

Morse2002), decide to participate only as a result of sensing low

transparency, or quite the opposite, decide to actually disengage in

despair as a result of sensing low transparency (Bailard2014). We

focus our analysis on advanced democratic countries, arguing that

trust does indeed come from a high level of structural openness but

that this is at least partially mediated by a citizen’s perception that

they can participate in the political system in a meaningful way.

A nuanced understanding of the conditional relationship between

governmental openness and public trust has both theoretical

value as well as implications for government openness policies.

Thus, the study offers the following contributions to research

on open government. First, this article addresses the question of

why government openness is associated with more trust by laying

out the characteristics of a trust regime associated with an open

government. Second, it asks whether the connection between trust

and preexisting structural level of country openness is conditional

on the individual sense of empowerment to influence governmental

systems. To answer this research question, the article examines

cross-level interdependencies of specific individual- and country-

level determinants of public trust. It provides evidence of the

trust outcomes of government efforts to open up organizational

processes to the public in terms of public participation as well

as transparency, thus addressing the gap in the literature (e.g.,

Ebdon and Franklin2006; Khagram, Fung, and de Renzio2013).

Furthermore, and according to Grimmelikhuijsen et al.(2013),

studies on transparency have considered the influence of country

and cultural differences only to a limited effect. We advance

research on government openness and trust by testing the effect

of government openness on trust in a European cross-national

comparative setting.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. First, we

present the theoretical foundation, develop our hypotheses, and

illustrate our research model. Second, we describe our sample and

our measures and explain our analytical method. Third, we report

our results. Finally, we provide a discussion of our findings and

outline suggestions for future research and implications for theory

and practice.

Public Trust in Government

Specifying the Trust Construct within Citizen–State Relations

Many authors from diverse disciplines (e.g., sociology, psychology,

and political science) have tried to define and model trust (e.g.,

Lewis and Weigert1985; Luhmann2011; Mayer, Davis, and

Schoorman1995; McKnight and Chervany2001; Rousseau et

al.1998). The OECD(2015, 156) defines trust in government

as “the confidence of citizens and businesses in the actions of

government to do what is right and perceived as fair.” Trust is also

related to individual expectations and beliefs, as when Bélanger

and Carter(2008, 167) describe it as “one’s perceptions regarding

the integrity and ability of the agency providing the service.”

Rousseau et al.(1998, 395) define trust as “a psychological state

comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive

expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” Similarly,

Van de Walle and Bouckaert(2003) see trust as a direct result of the

gap between citizens’ expectations and their perception of the actual

functioning of the government.

Trust Regimes

Many typologies, models, and theories attempt to distinguish

between types of trust (e.g., Lewicki and Bunker1996; Muthusamy

and White2005; Rousseau et al.1998; Sako1992; Thomas1998).

Bouckaert(2012) distinguished between three different types of

trust regimes, each of which can be matched with a different public

approach or public management concept. The first such approach is

the Weberian or Neo-Weberian hierarchical system of a traditional

bureaucracy, characterized as an identity-based trust regime in

which rights and duties are clearly defined and the public sector is

shaped by professional bureaucrats whose role and responsibility

as public servants is the basis of trust. The second, the new public

management (NPM) approach, meanwhile, uses a calculus-based

trust regime, which is grounded in rational choice, economically

defined exchange, and accountability. Citizens provide data about

their expectations, perceptions, satisfaction, and trust with regards

to government services, and the public sector reveals benchmarks

and makes quality models, financial data, and budget performance

available.

In this trust regime, declining public trust is a result of the

government’s performance failure, and the public sector must

increase performance to restore trust in the government. Objective

government performance is often difficult to establish among

different stakeholders, and so a third kind of trust regime

considers public trust as more of a subjective evaluation related

to the individual interpretation of information on government

performance (Welch, Hinnant, and Moon2005). This is a relational

trust regime, where trust is based on information and shared values

and objectives, and which Bouckaert(2012) relates to the new

public governance (NPG). Here, citizens express trust in their

government by collaborating with it, and the public sector invites

them to engage in codesign, co-decision-making, coproduction,

and coevaluation. Electronic government is becoming an important

“facet of governance,” and with the rise of information and

communication technology (ICT), citizens’ expectations regarding

services and information provision are increasing (Welch, Hinnant,

and Moon2005, 377).

The trust regime in open government is a fourth iteration. Open

government is a governance approach focusing on the ability of

citizens to online “monitor and influence government processes

through access to government information and access to decision-

making arenas” (Meijer, Curtin, and Hillebrandt2012, 13).

Although open government shares some characteristics with

NPG, such as its focus on collaboration and citizen participation

in governmental work (Bingham, Nabatchi, and O’Leary2005;

Osborne2006), open government is also a distinct concept

from NPG. It is strongly related to technological progress such

as internet platforms or mobile and ubiquitous connectivity

(Piotrowski et al.2018). Opening up governments aims at

integrating citizens into the political system as active participants

and coproducers by intensive use of all kinds of opportunities of

digitalization (Ingrams2015; Lee and Kwak2012; Mergel and

Desouza2013; Schmidthuber et al.2017). Open government

reformers intend to involve citizens as suppliers of policy solutions

and respond to their right to information by disclosing and

revealing governmental data online (Evans and Campos2013;

Meijer, Curtin, and Hillebrandt2012). As the aim of this article is