The public administration and public services have always taken a marginal place in the political scientists’ behavioural research. Public administration students on the other hand tend to focus on political and administrative elites and institutions, and largely ignored citizens in...

We use data from the World Values Survey to describe and compare levels of confidence in the civil service in a series of countries, and study determinants of this confidence. Instead of focusing on citizen satisfaction with specific public services in a specific country, we analyze citizens’...

Charters are official commitments to quality and reform. Belgium introduced its Charter of the User of Public Services in 1993. The federal administration’s Copernicus reform began in 1999 and had a strong external outlook. It therefore may be considered as a second User Charter. In this...

Current analysis of the public administration's dysfunctions in Belgium bears remarkable resemblance to the analyses made by numerous authors and commissions in the past 150 years. In this article, we provide an overview of the major administrative reform initiatives in Belgium between 1848 and...

In this paper we develop a contingency approach to representative bureaucracy. We argue that representative bureaucracy is a multidimensional and changing concept, and that in the academic and policy debate on representative bureaucracy three different dimensions are intermingled: Power, equal...

The transfer of responsibilities from central to local government has often been justified on the grounds of efficiency and democracy under the principle of subsidiarity. The existing models for mapping local government power in Europe, however, are often insufficiently detailed to allow...

The Lyons Inquiry into Local Government has introduced the English local government community to the concept of ‘place-shaping’. Place-shaping refers to the new role for local governments in promoting the well-being of communities and citizens. The processes of place-shaping are remarkably...

In this chapter, we challenge the assumption of a direct relationship between the existence and availability of information, and its use in decisions. We will do so by integrating three different sets of literature. Other chapters in this book stress organisations’ capacities and capabilities...

In this paper we criticise the use of general perceptions of corruption as indicators for actual corruption. We show that citizens' perceptions of corruption are embedded in general attitudes towards government, and that, therefore, these subjective indicators may be merely measuring the...

Concerns with declining public trust in government have become a permanent element of the contemporary political discourse. This concern also extends to levels of citizens' trust in the public administration and public services. Trust is said to be declining, and this decline is generally seen...