Experiencing performance : how engagement with public sector performance affects citizens’ trust in government and voice behaviour

Abstract

In democratic societies, citizens are both the end users and the indirect stewards of public policy, meaning that citizens’ ability to hold governments to account and express their voice is key for both citizens and policymakers. In addition, governments have a need for a baseline level of trust from their citizens to govern effectively. However, there is concern over declines in both citizens’ trust and voice behaviour, in addition to an inherent difficulty in simultaneously striving for citizens being willing to trust the government and prepared to express their voice. One avenue which offers some potential is engagement. If citizens can be prompted to engage with public sector performance, they can consider government trustworthiness and express their views as critical evaluators, forging a key link in a democratic chain of accountability. However, the effects of citizen engagement with public sector performance remain largely unexplored, as does the potential of engagement in reconciling the tension between trust and voice. This thesis examines the effects of citizen engagement with public sector performance on trust in government and voice behaviour using a mix of two behavioural experiments and secondary analyses of survey and qualitative interview data. The thesis extends conceptualisations of affective, behavioural and cognitive engagement from education sciences to citizen engagement with public sector performance and examines whether different forms of engagement have different effects on trust and voice. The thesis finds that engaged citizens critically evaluate public sector performance. However, rather than reconciling the tension between trust and voice, the results indicate that engagement with public sector performance leads citizens to generally view public performance more negatively, resulting in lower trust and higher voice. This effect is broadly consistent across different forms of engagement, with more consistent results for trust in government than for voice behaviour. The thesis indicates that although encouraging citizens to engage with public sector performance can be expected to empower them to raise their voice, this can be expected to occur at the cost of a decrease in their trust in government.