Abstract

For a number of years now, public administration scholars and practitioners have been concerned with the declining trust in public institutions. Putnam (2000) mapped the decline in trust in America in his seminal work Bowling Alone. This was one of many problems, but this concern about declining trust has not abated – survey after survey pose questions to the public about their trust in various institutions. The context can often be telling, with some institutions well trusted in one setting, yet highly mistrusted in another setting. Both theoretical and empirical efforts have been turned to toward the problem of declining trust. But what if we are overlooking a crucial component of trust? This is the puzzle.

Public policy, such as the Robodebt debacle, is often built on a lack of government trust – the government and public sector agencies fundamentally did not trust welfare recipients. Three decades earlier, the Australian Taxation Office abandoned much of its non-trusting approach to enable taxpayers to self-assess their tax returns – an act of trust in the public that paid dividends in the long run. These diametrically opposed cases show that we simply do not know enough about the governments trust in people. So why are we only ever asking the public as to whether they trust institutions? Why not ask them how much do they think the government trusts them? And why are we not surveying government and the public sector about their trust in citizens or clients?

This paper reviews the literature on the trust relationship between governments and people before illustrating the limitations of current survey data. The paper will then turn to mounting an argument for a fresh research agenda backed by some case studies which illustrate the difference that can be made by a public institution, organisation or agency projecting trust, and being trusted in return. In essence, governments need new measures of trust.

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