Building Trust Through Promises

Abstract

Trust is an important factor for the smooth functioning of the government and implementation of its services like e-governance. The political environment today is highly volatile and unpredictable, resulting in declining citizen trust in government systems. This is a key concern for governance, citizen engagement and participation, and service delivery. Today the scholarship on trust in the e-governance arena is developing rapidly. One of the most common instruments to build and promote trust are promises. However, promises are sometimes broken due to intentional and unintentional reasons. Governments may renege due to economic uncertainty, obsolescing bargain, political change and competition. This study is the first to examine a new form of promise "partial promises" i.e., where a promisor (one who makes the promise), signals an intention to carry out what is promised with some probability rather than with certainty. Such promises help maintain a favourable reputation even when the promise is not honoured. This study shows that though individuals trust and utilise standard promises relatively more, partial promises too, are effective in building trust. It is seen that partial promises have fewer negative consequences when broken. They lead to less emotions of anger, sadness, feelings of betrayal, and are punished comparatively less than standard promises. The study recommends following a flexible approach to applying e-government systems that have little public support and trust. It focuses on the highly topical issue of promises made by governments, and whether a more nuanced approach to promises or bargains made, might be made more conditional, and thus be a useful strategy in retaining trust and/or building confidence in e-government systems.