The Role of Open Government in Maintaining Trust in Public Administration

Abstract

The concept of trust has gained significance in the discourse surrounding traditional public administration, which has been questioned in various respects regarding its relationship with the public. The political, social, and economic changes that have occurred in recent times have led to numerous transformations in the unx”derstanding of public administration. It is crucial to maintain trust in relationships, and this is a topic that has been thoroughly discussed. Trust approaches are evaluated within public administration paradigms in this study. The objective of this research is to assess how government openness impacts citizens’ trust in the government. To measure the influence of open states on public trust, European social research data and data from the open government index, developed by the World Justice Project, were utilised. To investigate whether the countries’ level of open statehood alters trust in public administration, the study initially utilized the Kruskal-Wallis test, followed by the Mann-Whitney U test to identify the variance origin. The findings confirmed the positive impact of open statehood on trust.