Is a powerful but corrupt public manager more trustworthy? Lessons from the case of rural local government in Bangladesh

Abstract

ABSTRACT A survey experiment was conducted at the Union Council level in Bangladesh to gauge if citizens emphasise the power of the public manager (popularly known as Chairman of the Union Council) more than their corrupt practices. The analysis gauges that perspective based on citizens’ perception of public managers’ trustworthiness at the local level. The chronic absence of empirical research on local government public managers in a country from the Global South prompted us to focus on Bangladesh to carry out this research. The analysis of the two independent sample populations in the survey experiment suggests that local citizens have normative trust in less powerful but honest public managers. Our findings highlight that citizens in rural local government in Bangladesh have a certain degree of normative political awareness, which allows them to evaluate the public manager’s trustworthiness, not merely based on the power distance or patriarchal culture.