Conclusions

We commenced our analysis of trust between citizens and ministries by hoping that trust would make their relationships reciprocal, inventive, and uniquely fruitful. We supposed that a certain degree of trust is necessary to make democracy to work. Citizens who do not trust their governmental institutions cause unnecessary costs to the leadership of policy-making with their criticism, suspicions, and interference. If the process from trust to distrust continues unstopped, citizens may withdraw their support from governance or even become politically passive. Mistrust is a threat to the respected status and administrative efficiency of politicians and civil servants. As a result, they both could lose their sense of purpose in a democracy and end up with either overreaction or non-action in policy-making. Both alternatives bring about more unanticipated negative, rather than positive, consequences for society.

Our purpose was to find out to what extent citizens trust the ministries' leadership in policy-making. We began our analysis by measuring citizens' overall level of trust in ministries, after which we proceeded to measure their trust in value-capability, citizen orientation, regulation, and financial transfers of the ministries. The basic purpose of our study was to provide information for ministries to critically evaluate their internal and external conditions and operations to generate value for their policy-making. What did we find out?

First, we restate our assumption according to which citizens' opinions about politics and policy are truths to them, although they may not be held as such by those responsible for policy-making. Citizens calculate the imagined or experienced ethical expectations, benefits, and outcomes of different policies through their own aspirations, preferences, and objectives. How they feel, think or predict will explain to what extent they trust or distrust ministries. Opinions count and policy-makers can dismiss them at their own peril.

Second, citizens seem to be very reserved about expressing their overall confidence in ministries. They trust differently in different agencies. In other words, some ministries have succeeded better than others in earning citizens' trust through their policies. This observation should induce them to reflect on their policies and their achievements objectively and dispassionately. Because there are no previous studies on the subject, it is difficult for us to judge whether the level of trust is about average or perhaps too low or too high. For us, however, it seems to be that this level is slightly too low for a democracy to be healthy and for public bureaucracy to be respected.

Third, citizens seem to have a fairly low level of trust in the value capability, citizen orientation, regulation, and financial transfers of the ministries. These are four important policy tools for government agencies through which they realize their policy objectives. Citizens question the ability and willingness of the ministries to live up to their stated principles. They expect ministries to treat them more as subjects than as equal partners who could contribute significantly to the quality of policy-making. Citizens are afraid of the judicial problems caused by an ambiguous and complex regulation system. They accept financial transfers, but suspect their objects and justification.

Fourth, our results on external trust (citizens) are in conflict with those on internal trust. The OECD-report on trust in government shows that government has done an excellent job in implementing administrative procedures and policies the purpose of which is to maintain high ethical standards, transparency, and uncorrupted government (OECD, 2000). This means that external trust is not exclusively the derivative of the working order of the administrative machinery that they take as a given and necessary condition for modern government. What really counts is the political calculation of the ethical expectations, benefits, and impacts of policies.

Trust and distrust have consequences. It would be foolish for politicians and civil servants to ignore the question of trust and mistrust on any grounds, in spite of the fact that it is not wise to bind policy-making to the opinions of citizens. Mistrust could then mean that the policies that the ministries have introduced may have widened the number of alternatives, but failed to meet ethical standards, to produce proper benefits, and generate positive impacts. This reflection shows that trust is the deepest level on which citizens evaluate public policies.

Finally, it must be remembered that the results of our study serve primarily for the needs of ministries as central policy-makers that have the development of organization, processes, and personnel at their responsibility. Because of this, we recommend those who think a possibility of generalizing our results to some other countries to be cautious. Our results are derived from Finnish administrative practices with the purpose of improving them. Factors causing trust and mistrust may vary from country to country.

It is possible to argue that Finland's central administration fulfils clearly the criteria of modern public authorities and does well in comparison with other well-developed countries. It measures continuously ethical conducts in public services, has written standards for hiring and promoting civil servants, allows citizens to complain about injustices and misconduct, and keeps the machinery as open and transparent as possible. Our study shows that these successes are not enough for making citizens trust even a little bit more in public organizations. New thinking is needed in order to win citizens again on the side of their own government. This realization could be the new beginning in public policy in this information age.