Can IT Help Government to Restore Public Trust?: Declining Public Trust and Potential Prospects of IT in the Public Sector M. Jae Moon George Bush School of Government and Public Service Texas A&M University Email: jmoon@bushschool.tamu.edu Abstract During the past four decades, public trust in governments has continued to diminish due to various administrative, political, socio-cultural, economic, and mass media causes. Focusing on the administrative dimension, this study explores selected administrative factors to the declining of public trust, including public perception of administrative corruption (lack of transparency), inefficiency (wastefulness), ineffectiveness, and policy alienation. We argue that information technology (IT) can offer potentially useful tools to governments and help them to restore public trust by enhancing transparency, cost efficiency, effectiveness, and policy participation. This argument is illustrated by four selected mini cases (OPEN system in Seoul, eVA in Virginia, eFiling for IRS tax returns, and online policy forums in Seoul and Pennsylvania). Despite a generalizability problem, this study offers a cautious but positive view on the potential contribution of IT in restoring pubic trust. 1. Introduction During the past four decades, public trust in governments has continued to diminish due to various administrative, political, socio-cultural, economic, and mass media causes. The decline of public trust offers tough political challenges to politicians, public administrators, and citizens because it draws serious questions of political processes and the legitimacy of representative government. Previous studies examined various contributing factors to the decline of public trust: the gap between public expectation and perceived governmental performance, economic performance, the role of mass media, political scandals, changes in social capital and culture, perceived policy failures, etc. Focusing on potential contribution of poor government performance to the decline of public trust in government, this study explores how information technology(IT) can enhance some of the primary administrative values (efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and responsiveness) so that improve public trust in government in direct or indirect manners. Public perception of administrative corruption (lack of transparency), inefficiency (wastefulness), ineffectiveness, and policy alienation, independently or jointly frustrates the public, and makes them indifferent to public affairs, and consequently reduces the public confidence in governments. Considering this phenomenal issue of public trust, this study posits an exploratory link between these administrative causes of declining public trust and potential utilization of IT. We argue that IT can provide potentially useful tools to governments and help them to restore public trust by enhancing transparency, cost efficiency, effectiveness, and policy participation. This argument is illustrated by four selected mini cases (OPEN system in Seoul, eVA in Virginia, eFiling in IRS procedures, and online policy forums in Seoul and Pennsylvania). Despite a generalizability problem, this study offers a cautious but positive view on the potential contribution of IT in restoring pubic trust as IT is more widely employed by governments for further Web-based public services and further utilized and accessed by more citizens. 2. Public trust in government in the US There are many scholars and journalists who argue that confidence and trust of the American public in government has been declining. In fact, the longitudinal poll results support this argument in a convincing way. Peters (1999) asserts that public trust in government declines particularly as a reaction to various scandals (e.g., Watergate, Whitewater, Lewinsky), inefficient government performances (e.g., the savings-and-loan crisis, budget deficits), and policy failures (e.g., the Vietnam War) [1]. He also points out that economic instability and recession may contribute to the declining public trust as observed in the 1980s and early 1990s, though he also sees that economic prosperity does not always seem to promote public trust in a substantial way, as observed in the late 1990s. National Election Studies (NES) of the University of Michigan [2]collected longitudinal data regarding various political, social, and cultural elements of the public, including social and religious characteristics, partisanship and evaluation of political parties, ideology Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2003 0-7695-1874-5/03 $17.00 (C) 2003 IEEE 1