Citizens Care About Good Governance More Than We Thought

In an era of political polarization, citizens are often portrayed as divided on nearly everything. Taxes, immigration, climate policy, social rights—public opinion appears fractured and fluid. Yet beneath these visible disagreements lies a less explored question: do citizens share common beliefs about how government should operate, regardless of what government does? A new study suggests the answer is yes.

Published in the British Journal of Political Science and written by Anthony M. Bertelli (Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University), together with Silvia Cannas (Barcelona Institute of International Studies, IBEI) and Marika Danielle Csapo (Utah State University), the research is part of the REPGOV ERC Advanced Grant of which Anthony Bertelli is Principal Investigator. The study examines whether citizens hold coherent beliefs about the principles that should guide public administration and policy implementation. 

Values such as accountability, impartiality, legality, efficiency and integrity occupy a distinctive and surprisingly stable place within people's broader political belief systems. Far from being technical concerns reserved for civil servants and constitutional lawyers, these principles appear deeply embedded in how ordinary citizens think about democracy itself.

Drawing on original surveys of more than 2,600 respondents in Italy and the United Kingdom, the authors explored how governance values interact with political attitudes, moral beliefs and democratic ideals.

The hidden architecture of political beliefs

Political scientists have long studied what people believe about policies and ideologies. Much less attention has been paid to beliefs about governance itself—the procedural rules and norms that shape how public decisions are implemented.

The authors focus on six principles widely associated with good governance:

• Accountability
• Impartiality
• Efficiency
• Transparency
• Legality
• Integrity

These values are not policy goals in themselves. Rather, they are principles governing the means through which governments pursue public goals. As the paper puts it:

“They govern the means of implementing public policies.”

Citizens, that is, may disagree about whether governments should spend more, regulate more or redistribute wealth more aggressively. Yet they may still agree that public officials should act legally, fairly and transparently.

To investigate this possibility, the researchers used advanced network-analysis techniques that map the relationships among dozens of political attitudes, values and beliefs. Instead of studying opinions in isolation, they examined how entire systems of beliefs fit together.

Five governance values move as one

The study shows that five of the six governance values—accountability, impartiality, efficiency, legality and integrity—consistently cluster together as a distinct community of beliefs in both Italy and the UK. In other words, people who strongly support one of these principles tend also to support the others. More importantly, these values are far more connected to one another than they are to other political attitudes.

The researchers describe this relationship very clearly:

“Their interdependence with each other is overwhelmingly greater than their dependence on any other value orientations or attitudes.”

The result suggests that citizens possess an independent mental framework for evaluating the quality of governance. It is not merely a by-product of left-right ideology, partisan identity or specific policy preferences.

The diagram reflects the study's central finding: five governance values form a tightly connected cluster, while transparency occupies a bridge position linking governance to broader democratic values.

Transparency is different

Transparency emerged as the exception. Unlike the other governance principles, transparency consistently clustered with democratic and moral values rather than with the governance community itself. In Britain, it was closely linked to democratic ideals; in Italy, it aligned more strongly with moral foundations such as fairness and justice.

The authors argue that transparency plays a special role because it connects administrative procedures to core democratic principles such as freedom of information, accountability and citizen oversight. This unique position makes transparency more susceptible to influence from broader political beliefs than the other governance values.

Bureaucrats are not that different

A large body of public administration research suggests that working within government institutions shapes people's attitudes and motivations. Yet the authors found little evidence that former or current public employees think differently about governance values than everyone else.

 “Public employment experience neither alters the internal integration of governance principles nor changes their relationship with the larger belief system.”

Whether respondents had worked in government or not, the structure of governance values remained remarkably similar.

This suggests that citizens do not need direct administrative experience to appreciate the importance of accountability, legality or impartiality. These values appear to be widely shared social norms rather than occupational attitudes.

Resistant to political shocks

The researchers also examined how governance values react when other beliefs change. Using simulations based on network models originally developed in physics, they tested what would happen if large shifts occurred in moral values, democratic beliefs or political attitudes.

The answer: not much. Most governance values proved highly resistant to change. Even significant simulated shifts in political beliefs produced only modest changes in support for accountability, legality or impartiality.

Transparency again stands out. Though very hard to change, it is the governance value most likely to be influenced by changes elsewhere in the belief system.

A common framework

If citizens share coherent beliefs about procedural standards, they possess a common framework for evaluating government performance. People may disagree sharply about policy outcomes, but they can still judge whether decisions were made fairly, legally and transparently. This insight resonates with decades of research showing that citizens care deeply about process, not only outcomes. Fair procedures often generate legitimacy even when people dislike the final decision.

The authors argue that governance values provide precisely this evaluative framework. They help citizens hold officials accountable and assess the quality of democratic governance independently of policy preferences. At a time when many democracies are grappling with declining trust in institutions, this may offer a measure of optimism. Beneath political conflict, there may still be broad agreement on the principles that should guide public authority.