Journal:The Social Science Journal，Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2021.1899359

Key Words:Young civil servants’ trust; trustworthiness; public service motivation; authority-respecting political orientation

Abstract:Civil servants’ trust in citizens is an important but insufficiently addressed
issue in public administration. It is the key component of democratic governance
and cooperation shaping. This study examines patterns of young civil
servants’ trust in citizens, and explores the factors accounting for the variance
of young civil servants’ trust within the Chinese context. Our primary
finding is that the attitude held among China’s young civil servants is neither
too strong in trust in citizens nor in distrust of them. By employing ordinal
logistic regression analysis, this study demonstrates that four factors significantly
affect young civil servants’ trust in citizens: their social trust level, their
perception of citizens’ ability to participate (knowledge-based trust), their
spirit of self-sacrifice, and their authority-respecting political orientation. We
propose that the cultivation of an attitude of trust in citizens by young civil
servants is crucial for lubricating the process of China’s administrative
reforms.

All the Authors:于棋

First Author:刘华兴

Indexed by:Unit Twenty Basic Research

Correspondence Author:黄晴（通讯作者）

Discipline:Management Science

First-Level Discipline:Public Administration

Document Type:J

Translation or Not:no

Date of Publication:2021-04-01

Included Journals:SSCI