Politikių ir politikų požiūris į visuomenės pasitikėjimą Lietuvos valstybės tarnyba sąlygojančius veiksnius ; Politicians' attitudes to factors determining public trust in Lithuanian civil service from a gender perspective

Abstract

Trust is the basis for society's life quality and social wellbeing (Hosmer, 1995). High trust societies need less resources for bureaucratic and legal measures to protect their members from each other's' opportunistic behavior, their public institutions meet public interest with lower costs, their citizens are more actively engaged in democratic processes and crime prevention (Connell et al., 2003; Fukuyama, 1995; Putnam, 1993; Sztompka, 1999). Therefore, the crisis because of diminishing public trust in government and public institutions has been addressed by representatives from academia and (supra)national institutions, in particular in the context of public sector reforms (Berg, 2005). Prior research on public trust has been focused on government as the addressee of trust and, respectively, factors that influence this type of trust. In this respect, a study by Danaee Fard and Anvary Rostamy (2007) distinguishes performance results as factors of public trust. Moreover, it specifies that performance results integrate macro, e.g. unemployment rate, GDP growth, inflation etc. and micro performance results, e.g. citizens' satisfaction with public service quality. As civil service is an institution, which implements, manages and controls the realization of political decisions we argue that in order to understand the factors of public trust civil service as an addressee of trust should be explored. A representative opinion poll on public trust in Lithuanian civil service that was carried out in 2016 revealed that ethical values such as a civil servant's responsibility and respect to the client, impartiality of civil service organizations, their self-regulation and integrity are among the key factors of public trust in civil service (Novelskaitė and Pučėtaitė, 2018). In this article, we carry out deeper analysis of the factors determining public trust and explore the attitudes of politicians. Drawing on the concept of trust as an attitude, which integrates both cognitive/ rational and emotional components (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975; Taylor-Gooby, 2008; Tyler and Kramer, 1996), we assume that stakeholder groups such as politicians, media, businesspersons / associations have more opportunities to interact with civil service. Therefore, their experience may differ significantly from the one of citizens who are not exposed to active interaction with the respective institutions. As the representative opinion poll of 2016 indicated that politicians among other stakeholders have the highest trust in civil service, in this paper we focus on politicians' attitudes to the factors of public trust. In addition, as sociodemographic characteristics of respondents have influence on evaluations of trust (Beu et al., 2003; Hamm et al., 2016; Salminen and Ikola-Norrbacka, 2009; Tan and Tambyah, 2011), we take a gender-based perspective to the findings. The survey (n=142, 71% men and 29% women, 17% did not indicate their gender) findings indicate that politicians considered civil servants' qualification and professionalism in providing service as the main factors determining public trust. Differently from the representative opinion poll, their evaluations highlighted individual rather than institutional factors. Further analysis of the findings indicate that from the perspective of women politicians normative aspects of civil service institutions, their transparency and meeting public interest with the processes are important to trust development. From the perspective of male politicians, the internal aspects of performance of civil service institutions, pragmatic characteristics at individual level (e.g. provision of information to the politicians) count for developing trust. We conclude our paper by highlighting some aspects of improving management of civil service institutions and directions for further research.