New Public Management: Restoring the Public Trust through Creating Distrust?

Van de Walle, S., NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: RESTORING THE PUBLIC TRUST THROUGH CREATING DISTRUST? Christensen, T., Lægreid, P., eds., Ashgate Research Companion to New Public Management, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011

27 Pages Posted: 24 Apr 2010 Last revised: 15 Apr 2014

See all articles by Steven Van de Walle

Steven Van de Walle

Erasmus University Rotterdam - Department of Public Administration; KU Leuven - Department of Political Science

Date Written: April 15, 2010

Abstract

Policy makers frequently invoked restoring the public sector’s legitimacy as one of the main motivations for public sector reform in the 1980s and ‘90s. Low or declining public trust in government and a decline of the public sector’s legitimacy (perceived or real) became a central motivation for public sector reform efforts, notably NPM-style reforms.

In this chapter we first show how trust and legitimacy entered the reform agenda and became important motivations for public sector reform programmes in the 1990s. Creating congruence between what public services citizens really wanted and the services the public sector provided was seen as the key to regaining the public trust. In this first part, we also examine whether the basic assumption of declining trust was correct and whether NPM reforms have eventually contributed to restoring trust.

In a second part, we elaborate on the apparent irony that NPM wanted to re-establish the public trust by introducing distrust-based control and compliance mechanisms. We show that this is not necessarily a contradiction by distinguishing between three different types of trust and by outlining NPM’s effect on these three types of trust. We end by discussing the re-emergence of trust-based steering concepts in public management.

Keywords: trust, distrust, new public management, public sector reform

JEL Classification: D73

Suggested Citation

Van de Walle, Steven and Van de Walle, Steven, New Public Management: Restoring the Public Trust through Creating Distrust? (April 15, 2010). Van de Walle, S., NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT: RESTORING THE PUBLIC TRUST THROUGH CREATING DISTRUST? Christensen, T., Lægreid, P., eds., Ashgate Research Companion to New Public Management, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1594042 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1594042

Steven Van de Walle (Contact Author)

KU Leuven - Department of Political Science ( email )

Public Management Institute
Van Evenstraat 2A
B-3000 Leuven
Belgium
+32 16 323614 (Phone)
+32 16 323611 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.publicmanagementinstitute.be

Erasmus University Rotterdam - Department of Public Administration ( email )

3000 DR Rotterdam
Netherlands
0031 10 408 2518 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www.stevenvandewalle.eu

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
781
Abstract Views
3,300
Rank
55,837
PlumX Metrics