Citizen Trust in Civil Servants: A Cross-National Examination

ABSTRACT

How trusting of civil servants are citizens in North America and Europe? What individual-level and national-level attributes correlate with trust in civil servants? To answer these questions, data from national samples across 21 countries are taken from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2006 Role of Government module and are analyzed by estimating multilevel binary logistic regression models. Trust is correlated with both subjective (at the individual-level) and objective (at the national-level) indicators of performance. The quality of institutions also matters as countries with lower levels of public sector corruption experience higher levels of trust in the civil service.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil servants
• corruption
• government performance
• multilevel modeling
• trust

Notes

^1. In parliamentary and semi-presidential systems, the government is formed by the parliament. Therefore, the most common political party affiliation of the members of the executive cabinet is an indicator of the political party that wields the most political power. While identifying the political party in power is not as straightforward for presidential systems, the US is the only country with a presidential system among the countries in the sample and it experienced a unified government at the time of the data collection.

^2. Cronbach’s alpha for the additive index of the interpersonal trust measure is 0.69, close to the common standard of 0.70 for inter-item reliability.

^3. Cronbach’s alpha for the internal and external political efficacy scales are 0.5052 and 0.5517, respectively. While the inter-item reliability for these scales is lower than the common standard of 0.70, results are comparable when the questions are individually included in the models. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that the four political efficacy items load on two factors in the manner expected.

^4. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that responses strongly load on a single dimension with an eigenvalue equal to 2.97. Cronbach’s alpha for the six questions is 0.7954.

^5. The model was re-estimated with right political party affiliation serving as the base group.