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__Abstract__ The balance between trust and distrust is shifting – yet again. The move towards public sector reforms inspired by the New Public Management (NPM) from the 1980s on introduced a series of innovations based on mutual distrust between public sector actors. More recently, the concept of trust has gone through a veritable renaissance, and is now regarded as an essential feature of any kind of collaboration. At the same time, public distrust towards government and public administration has remained solidly on the agenda. In this chapter, we discuss the role of trust in the public sector. We first focus on the promise of public sector reforms to restore citizen trust through improving services and through aligning public services with citizen demands. We then further explore the basic premise of this promise, namely that citizens distrust public services and public administration, by providing comparative data on public trust. In the subsequent two sections, we introduce readers to the roles of trust and distrust in the public sector and in the relation between citizens and government, before moving on to contrasting citizen trust in public officials to public officials' trust in citizens. The penultimate section shows how trust has recently re-emerged as a key concept in public administration practice and scholarship, facilitating interaction and reducing the cost of transactions. We end with a short summary.

The Lyons Inquiry into Local Government has introduced the English local government community to the concept of 'place-shaping'. Place-shaping refers to the new role for local governments in promoting the well-being of communities and citizens. The processes of place-shaping are remarkably similar to the processes of nation-building. This paper uses Stein Rokkan's thinking on nation-building in Western Europe to analyse place-shaping. It focuses on the penetration and standardisation processes and underlines the importance of integrating peripheries, defining boundaries, and creating identities. In essence, it is argued that place-shaping is really about the repolitisation of English local authorities.

Policy makers frequently invoked restoring the public sector's legitimacy as one of the main motivations for public sector reform in the 1980s and '90s. Low or declining public trust in government and a decline of the public sector's legitimacy (perceived or real) became a central motivation for public sector reform efforts, notably NPM-style reforms. In this chapter we first show how trust and legitimacy entered the reform agenda and became important motivations for public sector reform programmes in the 1990s. Creating congruence between what public services citizens really wanted and the services the public sector provided was seen as the key to regaining the public trust. In this first part, we also examine whether the basic assumption of declining trust was correct and whether NPM reforms have eventually contributed to restoring trust. In a second part, we elaborate on the apparent irony that NPM wanted to re-establish the public trust by introducing distrust-based control and compliance mechanisms. We show that this is not necessarily a contradiction by distinguishing between three different types of trust and by outlining NPM's effect on these three types of trust. We end by discussing the re-emergence of trust-based steering concepts in public management.

Measuring and comparing the overall performance of countries' public sectors requires agreement on definitions and objectives of government. I argue that such an agreement is about finding a consensus rather about finding better definitions. Measuring government requires a number of leaps of faith, where certain definitions, assumptions and statistics are accepted as good enough for measurement and comparison. The political science and economic research community have a different tradition of dealing with such agreements and leaps of faith, and this is reflected in their approaches to measuring and comparing the performance of public sectors. The implications of these traditions are particularly visible in the usefulness of measurement and indicators for policy makers.

The justice system is not one of the most trusted institutions in the UK. While most citizens consider it fair, they also think it is out of touch in specific cases, and many consider it relatively inefficient. The UK is not alone. Many governments throughout Europe and the wider world are worried about low levels of public trust in the justice system. These worries are reignited with every (minor) scandal or heavily mediatised case.

__Abstract__ Citizens consider certain public (and private) services as essential services and therefore to be shielded from the full extent of market forces. Little is known about why some services are considered essential public services while other sometimes very similar services are not. In this article, we analyse public opinion using Eurobarometer data to test models exploring what factors determine whether citizens in 15 EU countries consider certain services as essential services and therefore to be provided to all. Despite the variety in public opinion, political orientations and geographic factors do little to explain why citizens have different opinions about the provision of public services. The article ends by outlining a research agenda for the further analysis of this underexplored research topic

The justice system is not one of the most trusted institutions in the UK. While most citizens consider it fair, they also think it is out of touch in specific cases, and many consider it relatively inefficient. The UK is not alone. Many governments throughout Europe and the wider world are worried about low levels of public trust in the justice system. These worries are reignited with every (minor) scandal or heavily mediatised case.

In the first section we briefly present some of the available survey material on citizens' perception of public sector corruption in Belgium. Using data from a general survey administered in Flanders (Northern part of Belgium) in 2003, we subsequently analyze determinants of general perceptions of corruption and unethical behavior. We show that these perceptions are to a large extent influenced by feelings of political alienation and general attitudes towards government. It is therefore difficult to distinguish cause and effect between trust in government and perceptions of corruption. We then will show that general perceptions of corruption should not be seen as an expression of individual experience. Parallels become apparent with how citizens evaluate government services, where a disconnection seems to exist between generally positive personal bureaucratic encounters and more negative attitudes towards public services in general. We end by reviewing possibilities for avoiding 'contamination' of perceptions of corruption by general attitudes towards government, and for developing indicators that better measure actual corruption.

'Politics is designed to disappoint'. That is one of the main arguments of Gerry Stoker's book 'Why politics matters: Making democracy work'. The book explores our current democracy and reasons for disenchantment. Stoker explains why people find politics such a pain in the neck, and he does so with a mission: persuading citizens that politics is crucially important to their freedom and wellbeing. .

This book is a European comparative study and is a translation of the original 2002 German-language edition published as Lokale Politik als Ressource der Demokratie in Europa? (Publisher: Leske & Budrich). Angelika Vetter, who is at the University of Stuttgart, focuses on the socialisation function of local politics in democracies and combines research on local politics with research on political culture and attitudes. In doing so, she builds on a political science tradition influenced by the 1990s Beliefs in Government project, which has been especially strong in Germany. She takes frameworks earlier mainly used to study national levels of politics and democracy and applies them to the local level. .

Zullen beter werkende overheidsdiensten bijdragen tot het herstel van het vertrouwen? Deze vraag roept onmiddellijk andere vragen op: werken de overheidsdiensten dan slecht? Ervaren burgers dit ook zo? Is er een nood tot het herstellen van het vertrouwen? Is er überhaupt een vertrouwensprobleem? In dit hoofdstuk zullen we trachten aan te tonen dat er niet zoiets is als een vertrouwen in de overheidsdiensten, in de administratie, in de ambtenarij of wat dan ook. Wat wel bestaat is een heel divers plaatje van verschillende, vaak divergerende attitudes. Negatieve houdingen tegenover de overheidsadministratie als geheel gaan perfect samen met een positieve beoordeling van heel wat concrete diensten. Het negatieve beeld van 'de ambtenaar' lijkt helemaal niet gerelateerd aan de vaak positieve opinies over de postbode, de politieagent, of de bediende aan het gemeentelijke loket. Een negatief beeld over 'de overheidsdiensten' verhindert niet dat de burger toch een positief beeld heeft over heel wat diensten waarmee men dagelijks in contact komt.

Despite the relative scarcity of polls, political polling becomes more and more important in Belgium. Reasons for this increase are threefold: The foremost reason is the occurence of a number of crises, which are said to have made politicians more sensitive to public opinion: a 300.000-people protest march against the malfunctioning of the justice system in the aftermath of the Dutroux phaedopilia scandal, and the occurence of a food safety crisis just before the 1999 election which had a deep impact on election results and lead to the ousting from power of the christian-democrats for the first time since 1958. In general, the traditional party-landscape has undergone profound changes, which is threatening the dominance of the traditional parties (liberals, socialist, christian-democrats), and makes voting behaviour very volatile and unpredictable. Finally, the present government (Verhofstadt I) devotes more attention to communication and image.

We empirically study whether citizens´ trust in public administration is influenced by the outcomes delivered by public services or by due process (administrative impartiality or absence of corruption)

This document provides the initial recommendations and KPIs for transforming public administrations into more effective, efficient and citizens' centric organizations. Specifically, this document focusses on recommendations aimed at increasing public officials' willingness to participate with citizens (Voice and Exit)

This document will present the final version of the recommendations and best practices to help the policy makers to adjust the public process in order to facilitate the cooperation between tall CITADEL s