Assessing the Relation between Satisfaction with Public Service Delivery and Trust in Government: The Impact of the Predisposition of Citizens Toward Government on Evaluations of Its Performance

Abstract

We study how satisfaction with service delivery affects trust in public agencies in an empirical setting. Our basic assumption is that the causal relationship between satisfaction and trust cannot fruitfully be analysed when the measures are not controlled for a common component, which we identify as the predisposition toward government. The empirical results suggest that the impact of a negative experience with a public agency is much more pronounced than the effect of a positive one. Decreasing the number of disappointed clients will therefore have a stronger effect on increasing trust in the public sector than increasing the number of (already) well-pleased clients: trust comes on foot and goes away on horseback.