What Determines Citizen Trust: Evaluating the Impact of Campaigns Highlighting Government Reforms

The role of trust on economic growth and the efficiency of large organizations has been well documented in the literature. For example, LaPorta et al., (1997, 1999) provide evidence linking trust and the success of large organizations and the efficiency of government. A related body of work has explored the link between trust and growth (Knack and Keefer, 1997) and patterns of trade/investment flows amongst European nations (Guiseo, Sapienza, and Zingales, 2009). Taken in its totality, this body of work shows the central importance of trust on economic development and societal well-being. Intuitively, trust provides a means to facilitate economic activity as it reduces an important barrier to trade – the need to undertake costly efforts to learn about the trustworthiness of others (Zak and Knack, 2001). Empirical results provide mixed evidence on effectiveness of our messaging campaign. While the messages impact measures of trust, subjective well-being and perceptions about the quality of service delivery in KPK, there is no effect of the campaign on respondents in FATA. Importantly, however, such effects are more pronounced amongst those who have been exposed to conflict during the past year. Moreover, given prior work linking political trust to an individual’s confidence in government institutions as captured by perceptions of quality and performance (see, e.g., Hetherington, 2005; Newton, 2007; Hutchison and Johnson, 2015), the impact of our awareness campaign on reported satisfaction with civil service delivery and perceptions about the quality of the justice and governance systems is noteworthy and provides a necessary first step in rebuilding overall trust in the state.