the Human Capital Costs of Low Trust in Political Leaders

The public sector in many countries faces a human resource crisis due to difficulty in competing with the business sector for high-quality employees. While seldom acknowledged, recent studies suggest that the concurrent rise of populist leaders, their involvement in democratic backsliding, and political polarization exacerbate this human resource scarcity. This article examines to what extent it is possible to maintain a large and diversified pool of potential applicants to the civil service at times of heightened polarization and democratic backsliding. Doing so is important for slowing down populist leaders’ attacks on democracy and the rule of law. Specifically, we are interested in how polarized trust in political leaders relates to potential job seekers’ willingness to join the civil service. We also investigate whether trust in civil servants, and the material attributes of civil service jobs, attenuates this relationship. We administered a survey and a survey experiment to a unique sample of 1678 undergraduate Israeli students from across higher education institutions and fields. We asked them about their trust in governing political leaders and in civil servants and tested how these perceptions relate to their willingness to work for government. We find that these two types of trust are distinct constructs, and that they interactively shape willingness to work in government, meaning that high trust in civil servants attenuates the negative effect of low trust in political leaders. Next, employing a conjoint experiment, we tested whether improved material conditions can ameliorate the politically skewed attraction to the civil service. We find that the association between trust in political leaders and attraction to government work is neutralized at higher salary levels. These findings suggest that fostering trust in civil servants, and favorable material attributes of government jobs, can sustain the plurality and capacity of the civil service through democratic decline, and political attacks on the bureaucracy.