Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How trusting of civil servants are citizens in North America and Europe? What individual-level and national-level attributes correlate with trust in civil servants? To answer these questions, data from national samples across 21 countries are taken from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2006 Role of Government module and are analyzed by estimating multilevel binary logistic regression models. Trust is correlated with both subjective (at the individual-level) and objective (at the national-level) indicators of performance. The quality of institutions also matters as countries with lower levels of public sector corruption experience higher levels of trust in the civil service.

A collection of surveys taken over the past several decades indicates that trust in government has been declining. One of the surveys is the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS collects information from the general public on a wide variety of subjects, including attitudes toward government, politics, and policy issues. 

The 2014 GSS finds that only 11 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the executive branch. Political trust is a crucial element of representative governance. With the upcoming Presidential election, it is critical to understand what explains public confidence in the executive branch of the federal …