Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on citizen trust. We conducted a pre-registered and representative survey experiment in six countries (n = 5,765): Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Norway. Our study focuses on three key dimensions of enforcement style: formalism, coerciveness, and accommodation. We hypothesize that a strict and punitive enforcement style with minimal accommodation will enhance citizen trust. Surprisingly, we found no overall effect of enforcement on trust. However, specifically high levels of formalism (strictness) and coerciveness (punitiveness) exhibited a small positive effect on trust. Furthermore, we observed no discernible impact of an accommodative enforcement style. Additional analyses revealed that the effects of enforcement style were not consistent across country and regulatory domains. This suggests we need to reconsider assumptions underlying enforcement theory, as our findings imply that public trust seems less conditional on heavy-handed enforcement than initially anticipated.

中文翻译：

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执法风格会影响公民对监管机构的信任吗？在 6 个国家/地区进行实验


建立和维护公民信任对于监管机构的有效性和长期生存能力至关重要。然而，关于监管行动与公民信任之间的关系的实证研究有限。本文通过调查各种监管执法方式对公民信任的影响来解决这一差距。我们在 6 个国家 （n = 5,765） 进行了一项预先注册的代表性调查实验：比利时、丹麦、德国、以色列、荷兰和挪威。我们的研究侧重于执行风格的三个关键维度：形式主义、强制性和通融。我们假设严格和惩罚性的执法方式，最低限度的便利将增强公民的信任。令人惊讶的是，我们发现执行对信任没有总体影响。然而，具体来说，高水平的形式主义（严格）和强制性（惩罚性）对信任表现出很小的积极影响。此外，我们没有观察到宽松的执法方式的明显影响。其他分析表明，执法风格的影响在不同国家和监管领域并不一致。这表明我们需要重新考虑执行理论背后的假设，因为我们的研究结果表明，公众信任似乎不像最初预期的那样以严厉的执行为条件。