Building trust in governments through digital platforms

Around the world, many people report distrusting their government. In some places, such as Latin America, North America, and Africa, trust in government has declined in recent decades. How can governments rebuild this trust?

New research from the MIT Governance Lab and the behavioral science research organization Busara examines how government partnerships with trusted private organizations can shape public trust in government. In Kenya, county governments have worked with a telecommunications company to develop an online public service portal. A survey of people in and around the capital city of Nairobi found that highlighting the role of the company increased people’s willingness to use the portal, but hurt their trust in government.

The results of this work, published in the September issue of the journal Government Information Quarterly, can help researchers understand how government digitization projects and relationships with technology companies affect public trust.

Trust in government and online public services

Studies have suggested that without public trust in government, people are less likely to follow rules and laws, and governments have a harder time solving problems that require public cooperation. Research has linked low levels of trust to people not paying taxes, lower voter turnout, lower Covid-19 vaccination rates, and higher Covid-19 infection rates.

In Kenya, a 2023 survey found that only 43 percent of people trusted the government. Corruption, poor service delivery, and flawed elections have likely hurt public trust. The Kenyan government is also a pioneer in digital technology for governance. Mobile money is widely used, and a centralized service delivery platform called eCitizen has made thousands of digitized services available to citizens. Such digital services can allow governments to serve people more efficiently and, if executed well, can build trust in government competency.

Does who gets credit for making a digital tool impact people’s trust?

Recently, Kenya’s 47 county governments partnered with Safaricom, a highly trusted telecommunications company, to create an online portal called My County Hub. The portal aims to allow people to request government emergency services, pay for business permits and parking, receive information from the government, and more.

In the new study, researchers told the more than 11,000 online survey participants how they could access My County Hub and some of the services it would offer. Some people were told the county government and Safaricom were both responsible for the portal, while others were told the government alone or the company alone was responsible. The survey also asked people about their trust in the county government before and after they received this information. The researchers hypothesized that people who were told the partnership was a public-private collaboration would have more trust at the end of the survey, with people’s trust in Safaricom transferring to the government partner.

Overall, people expressed more trust in government after being told about My County Hub, suggesting that digitization itself could be tied to increasing trust. However, trust did not seem to transfer from Safaricom to the government: people who were told about the partnership did not come to trust the government more than those who were told that the government alone was responsible. Trust sometimes transfers in settings where people don’t have strong beliefs about the untrusted group. But people tend to have strong beliefs about government, which could make it harder to sway their opinions.

Crediting the company could hurt people’s relationship with government

People who were told Safaricom alone was responsible for the portal expressed a greater willingness to use the portal and more interest in learning more about it. But relative to people who were told the government alone made the portal, the people in the Safaricom group had lower levels of trust in government afterwards. This could be because people viewed Safaricom as doing the work of the government, which could lower their faith in the government’s competency.

The results suggest that while emphasizing the role companies play in developing digital services could encourage people to use these services in the short term, it could also erode people’s confidence in the government in the long term. People with higher trust in government were also more willing to use My County Hub in the future, so long-term trust in government could be important for service provision.

The researchers also noticed that people told about the partnership did see their trust in government increase if they had high levels of trust in the government and Safaricom at the start of the survey. And the decreased trust in government in the Safaricom group was driven by people who trusted Safaricom but distrusted the government at the start.

These findings are in line with prior research showing that preexisting trust levels influence how trust changes during digitization efforts. In the future, research on people who distrust the government could look at other strategies for building trust through digital services.

The study’s authors include Lily L. Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science and the director and founder of the MIT Governance Lab, and MIT Governance Lab Research Director Lula Chen.