Citizen Trust in Local Government Performance in Essay

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Citizen trust in Local government performance in Botswana_

Meaning and content of trust has kept changing because of the changing points of reference. Trust in government used to refer to the belief that the government will not become autocratic (Bouckaert & de Walle, 2003). It currently refers to down to earth matters such as reliability of service delivery or the expectation that policy will correspond to an individual's wishes (Hofstede, 1980). Factors that determine trust in a government are not universal (Light and Labiner, 2001). Political systems with impeccable public service do not have to rely on evaluation on public service to determine one's trust in government.

Trust is related to performance. Citizens tend to distrust governments that underperform. Antigovernment context and negative images of bureaucrats are indicators that a government may not be performing well. To reverse declining trust, government institutions have integrated new public management and new public service into their structures. There is an assumption that better performance leads to greater trust. Bouckaert et al. (2001) have addressed the link that exists between trust and performance. They use macro and micro-performance theory to explain this. Newton & Norris (2000) engaged in studies that link trust to changes in quality or perception of government service delivery. Citizens have different expectations of how big government should be and what kinds of services the government should provide. Huseby (2000) aver that the actual level of performance does not matter but the gap between expectations and performance. Miller and Borelli posit that public confidence in government is influenced by subjective measures or citizens perceptions. Government performance is produced collectively by a number of agencies and some agencies may feature more strongly in citizen's image of government.

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Sims (2001) points out that performance is not the only criterion that citizens use to evaluate government.

Bouckaert & Van de Walle (2003) aver that public administration mainly used hard indicators like resources and output to measure performance. Because of increased attention on accountability and other issues pertaining to impacts and outcomes soft indicators like citizen and user satisfaction are so far being used to measure performance (Bouckaert & de Walle, 2003). Politicians, journalists, and in particular citizens have become worried due to decreasing level of trust in government. This has gravely impacted the image of the government and subsequently the cohesion of the greater society. Citizens are increasingly associating good governance with more trust and more satisfaction with the way in which the government delivers its services. Bouckaert & de Walle (2003) posit that increasing the quality of governance will make the citizens trust the government more and make then even more satisfied. The duo is categorical that the current attempts to measure trust and satisfaction in government are misleading because it is difficult to measure satisfaction. Satisfaction is also very service-specific (Stipak, 1979). Trust in government can be easier to measure; however, its linkage to good governance is far from clear (Poister & Henry, 1994). Even if trust in government were to be measured, it is not clear whether changes in the level of trust are actually influenced by government-related factors. They have thus advanced a hypothesis that trust could be insufficient but all-in-all an integral component of a set of indicators which are unnecessary but sufficient for….....

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