Establishing and maintaining trust in politico-administrative relations: evidence from the Danish civil service

Although trust is suggested as vital for relationship between ministers and civil servants serving successive ministers (Hood and Lodge, 2006; Mulgan, 2008) there is a lack of of empirical investigations of how trust is... [ view full abstract ]

Although trust is suggested as vital for relationship between ministers and civil servants serving successive ministers (Hood and Lodge, 2006; Mulgan, 2008) there is a lack of of empirical investigations of how trust is established and under what conditions trust is more likely to be characterizing politico-administrative relations. Through the lens of a Public Service Bargain Perspective combined with generic literature on trust in organizations the ambition of this paper is to contribute to our empirical knowledge of the generation of trust at the apex of public bureaucracies as well as contribute to theorizing trust in politico-administrative relations. Trust has in recent years earned prominence in the organization literature as a management mechanism which can potentially overcome some of problems pointed out by delegation literature, e.g. questions of information asymmetry, transaction costs and free-riding (e.g. Bijsma-Frankema and Costa, 2005, 2007, Bachmann and Zaheer, 2006), these findings underscore the importance of trust in politico/administrative relations. While trust can be approached as a structural phenomenon (famously in Putnams (1993) discussion of social capital), trust is also frequently seen as a relational phenomenon, characterizing the relationship between two actors (Dietz and Den Hartog, 2006). Following this approach, this paper sets out to map trust relations between top civil servants and asks what factors contributes to establishing and maintaining trust between top civil servants and their political principal?
Empirically the paper builds on a dataset with 783 civil servants from Danish local governments, representative of all civil servants at their hierarchical level, and constituting 55% of the total population. In addition we provide a more qualitative account based upon 20 semi-structured elite-interviews with the Chief Administrative Officers (kommunaldirektør) from local governments. This mixed methods approach enables a two-step analysis. First, the paper tests a number of hypotheses regarding the creation of trust, drawn from the existing literature (drawing on e.g. Zucker, 1986, Dietz and Den Hartog, 2006, Becerra and Gupta, 2003). Secondly, the paper explores the causal mechanisms suggested in the quantitative analysis through the qualitative material.
The study shows that demographic characteristics, like educational background, generalized trust, general agreement on the distribution of roles as well as the perception of the communication climate between politician and civil servant correlates positively with trust. On the other hand, perceiving the organizational environment as volatile correlates negatively with trust. These mechanisms are unfolded in the qualitative study.