Working Paper IV: Exploring Administrational trust in Flanders: Exploring the dimensions of administrational trust in Flemish public administration

Our objective in this Working Paper is to explore the dimensions of administrational trust in the Flemish administration. We discuss the relevant literature regarding dimensions of trust and explore the three dimensions of interorganisational trust in the empirical reality of Flemish public administration on the basis of the exploratory COBRA-survey, which looked at trust between agencies and departments. Our conclusions are that in general, respondents are rather positive regarding most items measuring the dimension of perceived trustworthiness. They were more negative for the item measuring the intention to suspend vulnerability and the item measuring behavioural trust was characterised by very consistent and positive answers. Departments are significantly more willing than agencies to suspend their vulnerability regarding a crucial task or problem in interactions with the biggest agency in their policy field. Furthermore, IVARP are significantly more negative regarding the ‘direct trust’ question and the perceived benevolence of their counterparts than departments, EVAPRP and IVAZRP. Also, EVAPRP and IVARP are significantly more negative about their intentions to suspend vulnerability than departments and IVAZRP. An analysis of control variables revealed significant differences between policy areas and also revealed that male respondents were significantly more positive regarding diverse measurements for dimensions of administrational trust. Furthermore, our exploration provides some first support for the hypothesis that interorganisational trust is a reciprocal phenomenon. In terms of testing the hypothesis that different dimensions of trust are interrelated, we found our data to be exploratory inappropriate for robust analysis and draw lessons for further research.nrpages: 57status: publishe