CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 328Public Policy and Administration ResearchPublic Administration in Developing NationsSocial Capital and Networks

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Outcomes, Process, and Trust of Civil Servants

Van Ryzin, G. G.·2011·Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
DOI 10.1093/jopart/muq092
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The contemporary performance movement has tended to assume that a key to restoring public trust in civil servants lies in a focus on outcomes or results. But there is growing evidence from various fields that trust in people and institutions of authority often depends more on process (such as fairness and equity) than on outcomes. This finding that process matters in the formation of trust judgments appears across a wide range of settings (police, courts, work places), yet it has not been adequately recognized in the public administration literature and rhetoric on government performance—especially in an era of outcomes-based, results-driven government. Using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Governance Indicators, and the UN Human Development Index, this article empirically examines the relative influence of process versus outcomes on the perceived trustworthiness of civil servants. Individual-level structural equation models are tested for the United States as well as all 33 countries in the ISSP. Country-level path models are tested using both World Bank/UN indicators and aggregated ISSP survey data. Results show that process has a consistently large effect on trust of civil servants, in some models several times larger than the effect of outcomes on trust. Although it has methodological limitations, this study should at least encourage more theoretical and empirical attention to government process, and not just outcomes, as a factor in explaining citizens' trust of civil servants.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/jopart/muq092

Cites

24 of 24 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 24 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. 2008, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 74, 45

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 101–200 of 324

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Van Ryzin, G. G.
Venue
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2011-02-17
Volume
21
Issue
4
Pages
745-760
ISSN
  • 1053-1858 (ISSN-L)
  • 1477-9803
DOI
10.1093/jopart/muq092
OpenAlex
W2144971385
Cited by
328
References
24
Citations by year
2026: 31 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 38 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 9
FWCI
32.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Public Administration › Public Policy and Administration Research
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Public Administration in Developing Nations
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social Capital and Networks
Keywords
public trust in government, public sector employees, trustworthiness, process versus outcome, equity and fairness, government performance, results-based management, perceived fairness, cross-national comparison, United States

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review