Abstract. The need for modernisation in the public sector is often motivated by referring to low levels of citizens’ trust in government. The negative image citizens have of their government and their public administration is said to be a consequence of the way these administrations function. Better quality public services are supposed to lead to satisfied users, which will in turn increase trust in government. But this relation is not as obvious as it may seem. This article outlines the conditions in which this micro-performance hypothesis on trust in government may be valid. Citizens ’ distrust in government is often related to the bad performance of government [6;45;54]. This partially explains the attention given to quality and reform initiatives in government1. The relation between performance and trust has however not been tested as extensively as many sociological explanations for (dis)trust in
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.