Trust in Citizens and Forms of Political Participation: The View of Public Managers

Abstract

Like all forms of collaborative governance, new forms of citizen participation include risk-taking and therefore depend on mutual trust between the collaborating actors. While there is a huge body of research on citizens’ trust in governments, public officials’ trust in citizens has received very little scholarly attention. In order to address this gap, this paper draws on a recent survey of a representative sample of public managers in local Swedish government (N = 1430). Do public managers think that citizens are trustworthy? Does trust in citizens impact which forms of citizen participation public managers prefer? Even though public officials are more trusting than the general populous, we show that not every public official do trust citizens. Furthermore, the results show public managers’ trust in citizens influences their attitudes towards new forms of participation. Just as citizens’ political trust has a positive impact on some forms of participation, but not on others, managers’ trust in citizens matters more for some forms of participation than others.