Research Insights: How Can Governments Build Trust?

Feedback on government performance can affect how much citizens trust government. The City of Buenos Aires ran an experiment testing different framings of government performance and their impact on citizens perceptions of institutional trust. Government perceptions were not changed by a language of empathy nor efficiency in communications, but trust was increased by providing positive feedback. The effect of communications had a significantly smaller impact on those already familiar with performance information, suggesting that providing information can have a long-lasting effect on citizens perceptions of government efficiency.