Trust Culture and the Ethics of Government: When Trust among Citizens Is Deficient

Abstract

Citizens’ trust in government mostly derives from the “ethics” factor, critically and particularly its “honesty” aspect. Public service is a public trust. This article aims to study the level of trust that Thai people perceive in the ethics of government, to investigate barriers to trust, and to provide determinant indicators that can promote ethical government and trust culture in the public sphere. Both questionnaires and the interview schedule were synthesised from the relevant literature. Based on the collected data, the findings were as follows: (1) citizens’ perception of the ethics of honesty of the Yingluck government is at very low level; (2) citizens’ trust in the ethics of honesty of the Yingluck government was found to be at a very low level in three areas of trust perception – trustworthiness, basic trust, and trust culture; (3) the relationship between the ethics of the Thai government and citizens’ trust were positively correlated in the same direction at a high level (r = 0.928); (4) there was a very high level (sig. 876) of inconsistency between the behaviours regarded as a test of the government’s honesty and those expected by citizens; (5) the major barriers to public trust in the Yingluck government derived from unethical norms and behaviours, a culture of distrust, political intervention in the bureaucracy, an unethical leader or a puppet leader (former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – Yingluck’s elder brother), mega-project corruption, autocratic rule, and illegal policies – the amnesty bill; (6) alignments to cultivate trust culture include incorruptibility, public interest and the upholding of justice, transparency and accountability, respect for diversity and for the worth and dignity of people, and commitment to excellence and to maintaining the public trust. The article postulates sufficient evidence to conclude that citizens’ trust in the ethics of the Thai government is at a very low level. It highlights where existing measures match the theory, but it also identifies a number of dimensions for which “trust deficiency” or “distrusted” was recorded. This was especially the case with regard to the content of the trust belief correlated with the ethics of honesty and to the selection of possible alignments for contributing to trust culture among Thai citizens.