Citizen trust in regulators – the role of expectations and emotions

Regulation plays an important role in citizen’s daily lives. When citizens have negative experiences with regulatees, they seem to increasingly hold the regulator accountable. For example, citizens voice their discontent with regulation in the media or file complaints at the regulator (Opperhuizen et al., 2020). This has consequences for citizen’s trust in regulators, which is crucial for the effectiveness of regulatory agencies (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017). To gain more understanding on citizen trust in regulators, this study focuses on the underlying expectations and emotions of citizens towards regulators. It will use the bureaucratic reputation theory of Carpenter (2010) as a framework to understand citizen’s expectations of regulators, as reputational beliefs for a large part shape expectations (Dantas et al., 2022). In doing so, this study serves several goals. The first goal is to gain more understanding on the underlying expectations citizens have towards a regulator. The second goal is to gain understanding on the consequences of citizens their (un)met expectations, more specifically for their trust and emotions towards the regulator. Previous studies have shown that different types of expectancy violations lead to different types of emotional responses (Bennett et al., 2020). This study will explore how citizen’s expectations, trust, and emotions towards a regulator are related. As both trustworthiness and emotions are seen as important drivers of citizen behavior (Vigoda-Gadot, 2007; Valentino et al., 2009; Guy, 2021; Bell et al., 2021), this study also explores the behavioral responses of citizens towards regulators. Using Critical Incident Technique, individual, qualitative interviews are employed with citizens that are involved in a regulator-citizen encounter. Using this method, we can elicit citizens’ emotions by recalling regulator actions that occurred in citizen-regulator encounters which significantly affected their emotional response and subsequent behavior.