The Analysis of Trust in Government Through the Assessment of Social Policies: the Role of Internal and Independent Evaluations

The objective of this article is to examine to what extent both internal and independent evaluations might serve as a tool to enhance trust in the policy implementation. We argue that the government implementation of social policies will be more trusty when it is clear who is responsible for their implementation, in comparison to social policies that have more complex distributions of power amongst different tiers of government. To do this, this article covers an assessment of the presence of both internal and independent evaluations of six social policies (health, education, pensions, unemployment, immigration, and childcare services — nursery) that vary in their clarity of responsibility or else, in the collaborative governance in their implementation. Our article focuses on the assessment of policy evaluations carried out by the different levels of government responsible for such policies, therefore creating a comparative assessment of the performance of central, regional and local governments. This research is based on a novel survey of academic experts (N= 337 respondents) of four countries (Austria, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland) conducted in autumn-winter 2018 and spring-summer 2019.