The Role of Trust in Public Management: Accountability and Discretion

In competing expectations of the public toward the government, trust has gotten attention from the scholars because of requiring rich communication and collaboration between bureaucrats and citizens to solve the complex social problems and to deliver better public service. This paper analyzes (1) how government performance and social capital are associated with public trust and also (2) how government accountability and discretion is related to public trust in international level. The statistical results confirmed the previous theory that performance and social capital affect positively to trust in public in the international level. Also, trust has a possibility to be a mediation role of the tension between discretion and accountability. Yet, trust did not have a positive effect on discretion. This is an opposite result when considering existing literatures. Overall, this research provides partially an empirical support for the effort to progress the role of trust. This study implies that we should be aware of the importance of institutional design of trust in public management, in which the government and the citizens can cooperate, resulting in an effective government.