Public Trust in Government in Japan and South Korea: Does the Rise of Critical Citizens Matter?

Based on the Asia Barometer Survey of 2003, 2004, and 2006, government performance, citizen empowerment, and citizen satisfaction with self‐expression values are associated with public trust in government in Japan and South Korea. This study finds, first, that government performance on the economy, controlling political corruption, the quality of public services, crime, and attention to citizen input are significantly associated with broad public trust in government in both Japan and South Korea. Likewise, citizens’ satisfaction with their right to gather and demonstrate and to criticize the government is closely connected to trust in central and local governments in Japan. In South Korea, citizens’ satisfaction with their right to gather and demonstrate is intimately linked to trust in local government. Implications for government leadership to enhance performance, transparency, citizen participation, and public trust in government are analyzed and elaborated upon in this insightful study.     

Do Group Decision Rules Affect Trust? A Laboratory Experiment on Group Decision Rules and Trust

Enhanced participation has been prescribed as the way forward for improving democratic decision making while generating positive attributes like trust. Yet we do not know the extent to which rules affect the outcome of decision making. This article investigates how different group decision rules affect group trust by testing three ideal types of decision rules (i.e., a Unilateral rule, a Representative rule and a ‘Non‐rule’) in a laboratory experiment. The article shows significant differences between the three decision rules on trust after deliberation. Interestingly, however, it finds that the Representative rule yields more trust than the Non‐rule and also significantly more trust than the Unilateral rule, when analysing the results at group level. These findings challenge the theoretical understanding by, for example, deliberative normative theorists that more inclusive, consensual and non‐hierarchical decision‐making procedures enhance trust vis‐à‐vis other more hierarchical decision‐making procedures.     

More Open but Not More Trusted? The Effect of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on the United Kingdom Central Government

This article examines the impact of Britain's Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2000 on British central government. The article identifies six objectives for FOI in the United Kingdom and then examines to what extent FOI has met them, briefly comparing the United Kingdom with similar legislation in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. It concludes that FOI has achieved the core objectives of increasing transparency and accountability, though the latter only in particular circumstances, but not the four secondary objectives: improved decision‐making by government, improved public understanding, increased participation, and trust in government. This is not because the Act has “failed” but because the objectives were overly ambitious and FOI is shaped by the political environment in which it is placed.     

Distance,services, and citizen perceptions of the state in rural Africa

In most poor countries, basic services in rural areas are less accessible and of lower quality than those in urban settings. In this article, we investigate the subnational geography of service delivery and its relationship with citizens' perceptions of their government by analyzing the relationship between service access, satisfaction with services and government, and the distance to urban centers for more than 21,000 survey respondents across 17 African countries. We confirm that access to services and service satisfaction suffer from a spatial gradient. However, distant citizens are less likely than their urban peers to translate service dissatisfaction into discontent with their government; distant citizens have more trust in government and more positive evaluations of both local and national officials. Our findings suggest that increasing responsiveness and accountability to citizens as a means of improving remote rural services may face more limits than promoters of democratic governance and citizen‐centered accountability presume.     

Representation,agendas and institutions

Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).     

Outcome‐focussed planning in Australian local government: How council plans and cultural development plans measure up

Contemporary public policy increasingly emphasises a focus on outcomes, the difference that occurs in the lives of citizens from policy and activity of government. Other contemporary imperatives for effective planning include: recognition of the values of the community whom plans serve, direction towards goals and objectives, utilisation of evidence, articulation of theories of change that underpin planning and responsiveness to evaluation. This article reports a desk‐based research project to assess how local government planning documents meet these imperatives. Two documents are examined for 67 councils across Australia: the major strategic document, council plan or other‐named document and the cultural development plan (CDP) or other‐named document that directs staff and investment aimed at cultural enrichment of the LGA. Findings indicate that the majority of councils’ documents appeared only concordant with one or two of these planning imperatives. No plan addressed more than three. Overall, council plans and cultural development plans did not clearly indicate their responsiveness to values of their communities, nor include objectives that formed measurable steps towards goals or formally refer to the use of evidence in decision‐making. No plans included theories of change to underpin decision‐making. This analysis indicates clear areas of improvement for planning for local governance.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

Developing and Testing a Theoretical Framework for Computer‐Mediated Transparency of Local Governments

This article contributes to the emerging literature on transparency by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework that explains the determinants of local government Web site transparency. It aims to answer the following central question: What institutional factors determine the different dimensions of government transparency? The framework distinguishes three dimensions of transparency—decision making transparency, policy information transparency, and policy outcome transparency—and hypothesizes three explanations for each: organizational capacity, political influence, and group influence on government. Results indicate that each dimension of transparency is associated with different factors. Decision‐making transparency is associated with political influence; when left‐wing parties are strong in the local council, local government tends to be more transparent. Policy information transparency is associated with media attention and external group pressure, and policy outcome transparency is associated with both external group pressure and the organizational capacity. The authors discuss the implications for policy and administration.     

25 Years of Transparency Research: Evidence and Future Directions

This article synthesizes the cross‐disciplinary literature on government transparency. It systematically reviews research addressing the topic of government transparency published between 1990 and 2015. The review uses 187 studies to address three questions: (1) What forms of transparency has the literature identified? (2) What outcomes does the literature attribute to transparency? and (3) How successful is transparency in achieving those goals? In addressing these questions, the authors review six interrelated types of transparency and nine governance‐ and citizen‐related outcomes of transparency. Based on the findings of the analysis, the authors outline an agenda for future research on government transparency and its effects that calls for more systematically investigating the ways in which contextual conditions shape transparency outcomes, replicating studies with varying methodologies, investigating transparency in neglected countries, and paying greater attention to understudied claims of transparency such as improved decision making and management.     

Democratizing the Administrative State: Connecting Neighborhood Councils and City Agencies

Citizen participation in government decision making, especially at the local level, has received heightened attention with regard to its promise for improved governance. The overarching administrative ethos of the administrative state creates barriers to citizen participation in governance. Developing and nurturing citizen participation in the presence of the administrative state is a significant challenge. Drawing on the literary tradition of public engagement and learning, this article models a developmental strategy of participation that offers one avenue for achieving meaningful partnerships between city agencies and neighborhood councils in a metropolitan environment. We present a model of citizen participation that brings neighborhood councils and city agencies together in a collaborative partnership. This model is based on the literature on citizen participation, which focuses on the significance of interactive processes in building trust among participants and creating mutual understanding and agreement.     

The Effect of Transparency on Trust in Government: A Cross‐National Comparative Experiment

Transparency is considered a key value for trustworthy governments. However, the effect of transparency on citizens’ trust across national cultures is overlooked in current research. This article compares the effect of transparency on trust in government in the Netherlands and South Korea. The effect is investigated in two similar series of three experiments. The authors hypothesize that the effect of transparency differs because the countries have different cultural values regarding power distance and short‐ and long‐term orientation. Results reveal similar patterns in both countries: transparency has a subdued and sometimes negative effect on trust in government. However, the negative effect in South Korea is much stronger. The difference in the magnitude of transparency's effect suggests that national cultural values play a significant role in how people perceive and appreciate government transparency.     

Policy Area as a Potential Moderator of Transparency Effects: An Experiment

Building on the counterintuitive findings of recent empirical studies that transparency in political decision making may have a negative effect on public legitimacy beliefs, this article suggests that transparency has different effects depending on the policy area. Specifically, it argues that transparency is less effective in policy decisions that involve trade‐offs related to questions of human life and death or well‐being. Using an experiment that involved 1,032 participants, the effect of transparency is tested in two policy areas that represent routine priority setting (culture and leisure) and policy decisions implicitly related to human life and well‐being (traffic security). Results indicate that transparency can increase public acceptance of political decisions, but this effect is moderated by the type of policy area. Furthermore, a limited type of transparency in which decision makers provide justifications for their decisions can result in benefits while avoiding potential costs.     

Regulatory impact assessment and regulatory governance in developing countries

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) offers the means to improve regulatory decision‐making and practice. RIA involves a systematic appraisal of the costs and benefits associated with a proposed new regulation and evaluation of the performance of existing regulations. So far, the adoption of RIA has been confined mainly to OECD countries. The purpose of this article is to assess the contribution that RIA can make to ‘better regulation’ in developing countries. Results from a survey of a small number of middle‐income countries suggest that a number of developing countries apply some form of regulatory assessment, but that the methods adopted are partial in their application and are certainly not systematically applied across government. The article discusses the capacity building requirements for the adoption of RIA in developing countries, in terms of regulatory assessment skills, including data collection methods and public consultation practices. The article also proposes a framework for RIA that can be applied in low and middle‐income countries to improve regulatory decision‐making and outcomes. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Credible Empowerment and Deliberative Participation: A Comparative Study of Two Nuclear Energy Policy Deliberation Cases in Korea

What factors make deliberative participation of public policy effective? Why, in some cases, are participants in deliberation more motivated than others, and reach their final judgment in a timely manner, based on systematic processes of opinion gathering and consensus building? By comparing and investigating two recent cases of public participation in energy policy deliberation in Korea, we argue that deliberative participation is more effective when the prospect that the outcome of their activities might be accepted by decision makers is high. The two cases, the public deliberation committee (PDC) on the nuclear waste issue which operated from 2013 to 2015, and the PDC on the nuclear power plant construction issue which operated in 2017, show that they went through similar courses of action, and used similar methods for deliberation. However, while the 2017 PDC has produced clear‐cut policy recommendations, and the government have accepted these, the 2013 PDC failed to reach conclusions on the given critical issues. We argue that the difference in the results is caused by credible empowerment along with two other factors––the sensitivity of issues and the learning effect. Participants of deliberation tend to judge the possibility of the government’s acceptance of their opinions based on either the government’s direct announcement or its inclusiveness in the past policy history. If governments are willing to consult the public to increase legitimacy and transparency, they should send explicit signals to the public on its inclusiveness in the short term, and also should increase credibility in the long term.     

政府廉政评价的公民参与机制研究

构建政府廉政评价的公民参与机制,可以促使公民建立对反腐倡廉的理性认知,增强党和政府廉政工作公信力,提升公民满意度。依据参与深度的渐次推进,公民参与廉政评价对廉政建设能够发挥象征功能、鉴定功能、诊断功能、监督功能、战略功能。案例梳理表明,在当前中国各地政府实践探索中,政府廉政评价已逐步从内部评价走向引入民意调查和第三方评估,公民参与正处于从"无效参与"向"有限参与"的推进阶段,只是参与式评价的政府主导色彩仍然浓重。要想进一步增强公民参与廉政评价的动力,使公民在廉政评价动态过程的各环节实现主体身份,关键在于激发被评价对象和参与者两个方面的内在动因,形成公民参与的拉力和推力,进而从"理念—制度—环境—手段"四维度构建公民自主、有序、有效参与廉政评价的合理机制。     

Keeping warm cookies: Cultural discourses of fun talk in public participation

ABSTRACT

Declining rates of public participation in the United States of America have raised questions about the sustainability and effectiveness of U.S. democracy. Some scholars have called for making democracy fun through the use of game design to make public participation more accessible. Using cultural discourse analysis, this study explores the locally situated communication practices of a civil society organization called Warm Cookies of the Revolution that seeks to (re)imagine U.S. democracy by making public participation fun. The research employs ‘fun talk’ – a specific communication practice within public participation – as an analytical unit and finds that fun talk served as a discursive hub of emotion with radiants of meaning connected to being, acting, and relating. In contrast to those who have argued fun democratic practices should employ game design to improve public administration, participants understood fun talk as a way to introduce them to civic affairs, form relationships with neighbours, and take action to improve their communities. The article discusses implications for theories of emotion and affect in civil society scholarship.     

In Search of Society? The Limitations of Citizen‐Centred Governance

Democratic governments have spent much of the last two decades attempting to recalibrate their governance systems around a single focal entity: the citizen. The all‐pervasive rhetoric of citizen‐centred governance has seen policies conceived, delivered and evaluated in terms of the satisfaction levels achieved by individual ‘citizens’. This article argues that by disaggregating societal interests down to the smallest available individual unit – the citizen – policy makers have created unrealistic expectations of individual participation, leading to public distrust when ‘citizen‐centred’ rhetoric does not match reality. Simultaneously, the focus on individual outcomes has narrowed the policy‐making gaze away from wider society‐level measures that could create more robust policy options in the face of ‘hard choices.’ The result – paradoxically – is that the more government focuses on pleasing the individual citizen, the less trusting those citizens are of government's ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.     

Inter‐level Trust in a Multilevel Political System

The aim of this article is to study political representatives in a multilevel government system and their level of political trust in relation to institutions in their own and other tiers of government. The results show that two factors are essential for understanding variations in their trust: Representatives tend to trust institutions in other tiers less than those in their own tier (the tier‐association effect), and they trust institutions more where their own party is in a governing position (the home‐team effect). Of the two, the home‐team effect is by far the most dominant factor. Multiple mandates serve to increase inter‐level trust, but divided loyalties possibly make representatives with multiple mandates less trusting towards political institutions in their own tiers than more partisan single mandate representatives. The study builds on data from surveys conducted among all elected representatives in Sweden in 2012 (local and regional councillors) and 2014 (national MPs).     

E‐Governance Developments in European Union Cities: Reshaping Government’s Relationship with Citizens

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, the challenge to governments is to improve citizens’ trust in governments. The Internet aids good governance by increasing transparency and customer‐oriented service delivery. During the last few years, European Union local governments have expanded their presence on the Internet. This article presents empirical evidence on the nature of e‐governance initiatives in cities across Europe. The findings could be of interest to cities interested in determining how their online presence compares with that of other cities. There are opportunities for information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance governance in local governments, but the focus of the ICT applications concentrates technologies on the management and delivery of services rather than on other areas. The Internet is not yet running as an effective medium facilitating democratic inputs into the policymaking process. Our study shows that technology is behaving as an enabler within preexisting social and political structures.