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

ABSTRACT

We empirically study whether citizens´ trust in public administration is influenced by the outcomes delivered by public services or by due process (administrative impartiality or absence of corruption) from a regional perspective. The paper fits a multilevel model on a unique dataset (N= 129,773) with observations nested in 173 European regions, using data from a series of pooled Eurobarometer surveys and from the European Quality of Government Index. We find that both public service outcomes and processes have a significant impact on citizens´ trust in public administration, but that process, and in particular absence of corruption is the strongest institutional determinant.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• public
• administration
• quality of government
• corruption
• impartiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at doi:10.4232/1.13154 and doi:10.4232/1.13007 and doi:10.4232/1.12847 and doi:10.4232/1.13313 doi:10.4232/1.12800.

Notes

1. Due to the small number of observations per region, we excluded the regions Cantabria (n = 28), Limousin (n = 31), Liguria (n = 14), Friuli-Venezia Guilia (n = 38), and Umbria (n = 37) from our analysis. We tested whether our results were robust to the exclusion of these five regions and concluded that their exclusion did not change our results.

2. Conducting a similar analysis on the proportion of variance in respondents’ trust in their public administration attributable to between-country differences, we observe that 13.6% of the variance can be explained by country differences. This proportion is 1.9 percentage points lower than the proportion of variance attributable to between-region differences.

3. The Pearson correlations between quality and impartiality, absence of corruption and quality, and absence of corruption and impartiality are .528 (p < .001), .562 (p < .001), and .761 (p < .001) respectively. As expected, the correlation between impartiality and absence of corruption is substantial.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No [726755].