Do Regulations Enhance Civil Servants' Trust in NGO Contractors for Public Service Innovation? A Comparative Analysis of Conjoint Experiments in China

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Li, Wei; Chen, Fei; Tong, Xiao
• 署名单位: Huazhong University of Science & Technology; East China University Political Science & Law
• 刊物名称: REGULATION & GOVERNANCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1748-5983
• DOI: 10.1111/rego.70049
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: Network structure; governance; coproduction; familiarity; POLITICS; SYSTEM

摘要

Public procurement has been adopted by many countries as a tool to innovate public services. However, public service innovation also exposes civil servants to the risk of being criticized for perceived failures in outcome. Empirically studying the relations between regulations and civil servants' trust in contractors will deepen our understanding of the critical role trust plays in collaborative public service innovation. Investigating civil servants' trust in NGO contractors delivering public service innovations in China enables us to explore this issue in a non-Western and transitional context. The study posits that trustors' preferences serve as a better measure of their trust behavior than self-reported trust. Based on two conjoint experiments conducted among 234 civil servants in China, we categorized civil servants' trust in NGO contractors into nine types. The findings suggest that when regulations on service quality and scope are in place, civil servants attach more importance to the types of trust based on professional competence, responsive competence and partisan loyalty of the NGO bidders. When the regulatory context is uncertain, trust based on integrity is considered to be more important than competence- and benevolence-based trust. Under this scenario, small NGOs with a lower level of competence and partisan loyalty have more opportunities to secure government contracts. Nevertheless, they could be subject to government control and risk losing autonomy in serving the community. There could also be increased risks of failure in public service co-production which requires responsive competence as well as benevolent intention of the NGOs to achieve positive policy and societal outcome. More experiments using larger and more heterogeneous samples in alternative service sectors can be conducted in future to test the generalizability of these findings.