Blame or gain? Is institutional trust impacted by the perception of political influence in state-owned enterprises?

Investigating institutional trust has a strong tradition in public administration research (Bouckaert and Van de Walle 2003; Van de Walle et al. 2008; Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2013). Blame attribution theory suggests that citizens may blame politicians for serious distrust in public service providers, however there is only scarce evidence with respect to municipally owned corporations in a private law context (Bisgaard 2015; Van den Bekerom et al. 2021). Considering a large-scale survey experiment on 2,023 German citizens, we investigated whether citizen trust in local energy providers is affected by perceptions of political influence. Evidence suggests that there is a small bias effect of perceived influence, however this effect contradicts with the blame attribution hypothesis. We find that citizens are much more positive towards direct political influence than predicted.