Measuring Citizen Trust in Regulatory Agencies: A Systematic Review and Ways Forward

Research has increasingly demonstrated that citizens’ trust in regulatory agencies reinforces the functioning of society and of markets, driving compliance and increasing consumer trust in the sectors they regulate. Therefore, due to its importance, this study aims to assess the state of contemporary research on citizen trust in regulatory agencies. We aimed to systematically gather information on which empirical contexts researchers have sought to measure such trust and, more significantly, what specific measures of trust researchers have applied. We sought then to analyze these results to identify strengths and limitations in current scholarship. We aim to answer the following two questions: (1) To what extent can the existing data shed light on trust in regulatory agencies? (2) Are the existing measures of trust sufficient for assessing trust in regulatory agencies? Surprisingly, while there have been numerous articles on conceptualizing and measuring citizen trust in other political institutions, we find that there has been hardly any on citizen trust in regulatory agencies. The limited number of studies that empirically measure citizen trust in regulatory agencies show promising results, but also highlight the need for improvement of current measurements. we argue that improving how we study citizen trust in regulatory agencies is a priority for regulatory and trust research. As was the case for trust in politicians and ministries, citizen trust in regulatory agencies requires measurements which can be replicated, compared, and used for meta-analysis. Only in this way can scholarship build an accumulative knowledge base on citizen trust in regulatory agencies.