Project

The project 'citizen governance: quality and trust in government' was commissioned by the ministry of the Flemish Community. It wants to establish the conditions for and nature of a relation between the quality of public services, user satisfaction and citizens' trust in government.

Relevance

Policy-makers are concerned with low levels of trust in government. The functioning of the public administration is an often-mentioned cause for this distrust. The modernisation of the public sector machinery takes quite a central position among the general strategies to restore trust. Improvement initiatives, is the idea, make the quality of public service provision more manifest and increase it. This, in turn, leads to a satisfaction among citizens, which results in increased trust in government. This reasoning contains many steps that are neither theoretically nor empirically ultimately supported, and are even contested.

Aims

The project ‘Citizen Governance’ wants to analyse citizens’ attitude towards government and the public administration more specifically: what are the evolutions of trust in government? Why are citizens satisfied or dissatisfied with government service delivery? What is the image of civil servants? Little is known about the satisfaction and trust of the customers of public services. Although governmental institutions at the micro level (e.g., transportation services) in many cases have done their own inquiries towards their customers, a fathomable overview of research done in this area does not exist. A second goal of this project besides measuring dissatisfaction and distrust, is to inquire on the relationship of these two predicates with the (experienced) quality level of the involved public service and/or governmental institution. The hypothesis of a link between quality, perception, expectations, satisfaction with service delivery and governments, and finally trust in the public sector and its governmental institutions, requires to set up tests of these links or certain parts.

Method

• Large-scale survey among the inhabitants of the Flemish Region by means of face-to-face interviews and two questionnaires by mail. The questionnaire contains questions on government service delivery, politics, and societal evolutions. In the year 2002, interviewers interviewed 1248 people, and 2166 people filled out a mail questionnaire. In 2003, another 3200 citizens will receive a questionnaire by mail.
• Secondary analysis of customer satisfaction surveys organised within the services and departments of the ministry of the Flemish Community and the Flemish Public Agencies.
• Apart from an analysis of the content of the surveys, they will also be analysed for methodological purposes. This research should help to identify the most reliable ways to measure trust and satisfaction: what are the most useful indicators of trust, what are the weak and what are the strong points of mail vs. face-to-face surveys,...
  

Within the research project, Steven Van de Walle is preparing a PhD on 'Perceptions of Administrative Performance'