Participation, transparency and trust in local governance in transitional countries: the case of Vietnam

ABSTRACT The cynicism about government has induced administration reforms in both developed and transitional countries. However, the reform outcomes are not similar across countries and depend on the administrative context. In this paper, we employ the cultural-based administration approach to investigate the role of trust in citizen participation and the linking between participation and transparency in Vietnam. Using aggregated data at the district level from the Public Administration Performance Index in Vietnam in 2018–19 and considering the two-way association issue, we find that transparency is not always indicative of participation and trust is shown to be an important determinant of public participation. Furthermore, in addition to normative factors such as education levels and the proportion of rural citizens, trust plays a significant role in explaining the inverse relationship between participation and transparency. Our results contribute one more empirical evidence to the scarce literature that embeds the administration culture analysing administrative reform outcomes in transitional countries.