Validating a scale for citizen trust in government organizations

TLDR

Citizen trust in government has been studied at the macro level, yet organizational trust is multidimensional and lacks validated measures in public administration, and worldwide governments suffer from low perceived trustworthiness, highlighting the need for specific measurement tools. The study aims to validate a meso‑level scale of government organization trust to better determine its effects and antecedents, introducing a first‑validation instrument with perceived competence, benevolence, and honesty dimensions. The scale adapts an existing organizational trust measure to public administration and is validated with 991 participants across two samples, yielding nine items that assess perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity. The resulting nine‑item scale is useful for researchers and practitioners to obtain a multi‑dimensional understanding of trust and to identify specific trustworthiness issues in government organizations.

Abstract

Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has shown that organizational trustworthiness is multidimensional, but the extant literature has not validated such measures in a public administration context. The proposed scale builds on and adapts an existing organizational trust scale to a public administration context. The ‘Citizen Trust in Government Organizations’ scale is validated using data from two different samples (total n = 991), resulting in a scale of nine items measuring three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity. This scale can be used by other researchers and is valuable to gain a more specific and multi-dimensional understanding of trust in government organizations. Points for practitioners A major problem for government organizations worldwide is the lack of perceived trustworthiness by the public. To tackle this problem, a way to measure it is needed, but at the moment there are only generic measures to assert perceived trustworthiness in a government organization. This article presents a first validation and incorporates three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and honesty. Practitioners can use this scale and adapt to their relevant local context to identify specific trustworthiness problems.