Effects of Transparency on the Perceived Trustworthiness of a Government Organization: Evidence from an Online Experiment

By Stephan G. Grimmelikhuijsen, Albert Jacob Meijer. 2014

489 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the effect of government transparency on trust is heavily debated, our theoretical and empirical understanding of this relation is still limited. The basic assumption tested in this article is whether transparency leads to higher levels of perceived trustworthiness. This article uses theories from social psychology to advance our understanding of the effects and mechanism of the relation between transparency and the perceived trustworthiness of a government organization. Based on these theories we propose two alternative hypotheses, which state that (1) the general predisposition to trust government and (2) prior knowledge about the specific issue moderate the relation between transparency and trust. These assumptions are tested by online experimental research, which demonstrates that these factors indeed affect the relation between transparency and perceived trustworthiness: changes in perceived competence occur mainly in the group of citizens with high trust and little knowledge, whereas changes in perceived benevolence occur predominantly in the group of citizens with low knowledge and low trust. These findings highlight that prior knowledge and general predisposition to trust should be incorporated in our theoretical models of the relation between transparency and perceived trustworthiness.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/69b93a0e8906638209679ca2ea33a3c37ac0ed1d

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In Political Science and International Relations

In Public Administration

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Citations in the corpus

Transparency you can trust: Transparency requirements for artificial intelligence between legal norms and contextual concerns (2019, background): “In the organizational literature, trustworthiness has been closely linked to transparency in recent years (Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2012, Schnackenberg and Tomlinson, 2016).”
Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook? (2018, background): “In this respect, online transparency, via local government websites, generates increased confidence among citizens (Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2014).”