Managerial quality, administrative performance and trust in governance revisited: A follow-up study of causality

Reports on a follow-up study of the relationship between managerial quality, administrative performance and citizens' trust in government and in public administration systems. The study was based an a survey of 502 Israeli citizens conducted during 2002 and was compared with a similar study that was conducted during 2001 among 345 Israeli citizens. The research tried to validate and replicate previous findings on the question of causality between performance and trust. As in the 2001 survey the technique of structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.3 was applied to test three competing models that were similar to those tested in the past. The present findings were very consistent with the previous ones found by the authors showing that the second model was the best fit with the data. According to this model managerial quality leads to administrative performance and ultimately to trust in governance. The findings support previous assumptions that administrative performance may be treated as a precondition to trust in governance rather than trust serving as the precondition to performance.