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The purpose of this paper is to present findings of a survey conducted during 2012 in Iceland with the intent of examining public opinion on government provision of information, i.e. whether the public felt that the authorities withheld information, either about subjects of general public interest or about public expenditures, if the authorities felt there was a reason to do so.

A survey questionnaire was sent in March 2012 to almost two thousand Icelanders. This was a random sample selected from the National Registry. The response rate was almost 67 per cent. The survey was modelled on other research and resources that had examined trust toward public authorities and the influence of Freedom of Information Acts on government information practices.

The survey discovered that the greater part of the citizenry felt that the authorities did keep important information of general public interest secret often or sometimes. Only 2-3 per cent of them believed that this never happened. Most of those surveyed felt as well that important information about public expenditures was often or sometimes withheld. Only 3-5 per cent of the respondents were of the opinion that this never happened.

The results could be of value to public authorities that want to improve the provision of information and practice according to freedom of information act. They could also bring varied and valuable opportunities to the profession of records managers as well as others who practice information management.

The survey adds valuable information and fulfils a need for a better understanding of what the public believes regarding government provision of information in Iceland. Although the survey is limited to Iceland, these findings may also be of value to public authorities and researchers in the Western World, Australia and New Zealand, to give a few examples where the culture and the practice of government may not be that different, as well as in other countries. The survey can lay the foundation for further research into the field.

The purpose of this paper is to present, on the one hand, the findings of a survey conducted during 2012 in Iceland and, on the other hand, the results of interviews held in 2015 concerning why it was felt that the authorities withheld information either about subjects of general public interest or about public expenditures.

A survey questionnaire was sent in March 2012 to almost 2,000 Icelanders randomly selected from the National Registry. The response rate was almost 67 per cent. As to the interviews held in 2015, these were with individuals who were known to understand well the government’s actions, both as to provision of information to the public and the opposite, suppression of information. The interviewees were chosen purposively. The survey was modelled on other research and resources concerning open public information and other research that had examined trust towards public authorities and the influence of freedom of information acts on government information practices.

The research revealed that both participants in the questionnaire survey and the six interviewees in the later study felt that information was kept secret for a variety of reasons. Most felt that information was kept under wraps by the government, both about subjects of general public interest or about public expenditures, and that both transparency and traceability were less than sufficient in the public administration of Iceland.

The results could be of value to public authorities who want to improve the provision of information and practices according to the freedom of information act. They could also bring diverse and valuable opportunities to the profession of records managers as to documentation and registration, as well as others who practice information management.

The survey adds valuable information and fulfils a need for a better understanding of why public authorities suppress the provision of information in Iceland. Although the research cited was limited to Iceland, the findings may be of value also to public authorities and researchers in the Western World, Australia and New Zealand to give a few examples where the culture and the practice of government may not be that different, as well as in other countries. The two studies can, therefore, lay the foundation for further research into the field.

To respond to the COVID-19 “infodemic” and combat fraud and misinformation about the virus, social media platforms coordinated with government healthcare agencies around the world to elevate authoritative content about the novel coronavirus. These public health authorities included national and global public health organisations, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In this article, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of this strategy by asking two key questions: (1) Did people engage with authoritative health content on social media? (2) Was this content trusted?

The authors explore these issues by drawing on data from a global online questionnaire on “Public Trust in Experts” (n = 429) conducted during the initial phase of the pandemic in May 2020, a crucial period when reliable information was urgently required to influence behaviour and minimise harm.

The authors found that while the majority of those surveyed noticed authoritative health content online, there remained significant issues in terms of Internet users trusting the information shared by government healthcare agencies and public health authorities online.

In what follows, the authors examine the role of trust in implementing this novel public health strategy and assess the capacity for such policies to reduce individual and social harm.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2021-0655

The purpose of this paper is to identify the level of public trust in disaster response actors, i.e. the government, civilian disaster response institutions, the military, NGOs and the media.

The data source is the 2015–2016 Slovenian Public Opinion Survey, which used face-to-face interviews (computer-assisted personal interviewing software), and a standardised instrument (questionnaire). A two-stage probability sampling design with stratification at the first stage was applied. The first stage involved a probability proportional to size selection of 150 small areas (statistical areas), where the size measurement was a the number of adult persons in the Central Population Register. The second stage involved the simple random sampling of 12 persons from each of the 150 primary sampling units. A total of 1,024 adult residents participated in the survey.

The findings suggest that trust in the government under normal situations is low; however, it becomes slightly higher during disaster conditions. Civilian disaster response institutions (especially firemen and civil protection), the military and NGOs (humanitarian and other volunteer organisations) are highly trusted before and during disasters. Trust in the authorities and media to inform the public in a timely and comprehensive manner about the disaster is also relatively high.

Perhaps in another period of research, disaster-related experiences of the population might be different, which could certainly change the survey results about trust. Nevertheless, the main finding that low pre-disaster trust can be recovered during a disaster by adequate performance of the institution is not jeopardised.

The survey results are original.

Governments around the world have shown poor capabilities in responding effectively to the COVID-19 health emergency outbreaks. After the declaration of COVID-19 as an international pandemic by the World Health Organization on January 31, 2020, three countries experienced the greatest initial impact in Europe. Sequentially Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) were hit by the highest numbers of contagion and death in the first few months in Europe. The aim of this paper is to assess how information channels and sources influenced the public’s evaluation of the three government’s communication response strategies.

An online survey was conducted between March 14 and April 14, 2020, during the first wave of lockdowns and declarations of States of Emergency in the three countries.

Findings show particularities for the different countries, but also similarities in response and reactions of the public in the three scenarios. The response strategy of the UK Government was the most untrusted and criticized by citizens. In contrast, the Italian and Spanish Governments, which both chose to respond with the severest restrictions, attracted more support from citizens, especially in Italy, which was the first to close borders and impose lockdowns for the population.

Despite the national differences in the preference of information channels and sources, overall, an empirical relationship between government communication assessment and media use were found in all the scenarios.

This empirical study has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, findings will add evidence of implications of the Channel Complementary Theory to the field of risk, crisis and emergency communication. The results also provide insights for communication practitioners in the public sector on how forms of information and trust in sources influence the public’s assessment of authorities’ communication.

Implications for theory and empirical research about communication during a health pandemic are identified and discussed.

Citizens engage at a high level and synchronize their use of multiple media and platforms in all the three national scenarios.

Stronger criticism is provided by online media, especially social media and online press in the different national contexts.

Results corroborate that factors related to media choice need to be operationalized for risk and crisis communication research.

When public health depends on people understanding the actions they need to take, the possibility of disobedience is highly dependent on trust.

Compared with Spain and the United Kingdom (UK), trust in government institutions in Italy was stronger and could be explained by the higher use of owned media for information-seeking.

A debate emerged among members of public administration academia soon after COVID-19 appeared on the roles and measures that governments ought to deploy to prevent infection. One prevalent discourse is the strength of “strong government” in the fight against the virus—the administrative capacity to launch prompt, appropriate and effective actions that entail collaboration with citizens. A notable development in governance is that new public management (NPM) principles, such as the value of money and the pluralisation of service delivery, are gradually put aside when governments urgently need to curb the spread of infection. The roles of bureaucracy and centralised action are re-emphasised in the policymaking and implementation of anti-epidemic measures. Such a trend allows us to examine if the COVID-19 public health crisis has fundamentally reversed the trend of government retreat in public service within neoliberal regimes since the 1980s.

For this research, the authors selected two “strong governments” in Asia—Hong Kong and Taiwan—by showing how administrators outline their anti-pandemic strategies, examining the role of government in coordinating responses and how bureaucracy interacts with the other two key domains of the governance mechanism: civil society and the market. These two offshore Chinese capitalist economies and pluralistic societies are perceived to have “strong government capacity” in the fight against COVID-19, presumably as a key attribute to their success confining the spread of infection during the early stages of the first outbreak. Both societies reported low infection rates and low mortality rates until September 2020. The authors browsed databases developed by scholars (Cheng et al., 2020; Hale et al., 2020) and referred to two “rubrics” to assess and compare government actions in both places in response to COVID-19. The authors itemised, categorised and counted the policy actions in both places according to the rubrics, noticed that the policy footprint appeared in over two-thirds of indicators of proactive government interventions and identified double-digit counts in nearly half of the categories.

The authors found that both governments attempted to establish strong stewardship and quick measures to contain the infection. The pattern of “strong government” is, however, not the same as that superficially exhibited. Taiwan took limited steps to regulate business activities but proactively intervened and coordinated the supply of hygienic utilities. Hong Kong launched aggressive attempts to reduce human mobility but remained non-active despite the “face mask run” in society. The “strong government” aspect also received divergent reactions from society. There was extensive cross-sectoral collaboration under the centralised “National Team” advocacy in Taiwan, and there has been no record of local infection for over 10 months. The Hong Kong government was repeatedly doubted for its undesirable stewardship in anti-epidemic measures, the effectiveness of policy interventions and the impartiality of law enforcement. Spontaneous actions during the health crisis from civil societies and private markets were noted, but they seemed uncoordinated with official attempts.

The initial findings enable us to rethink correlations between state capacity and legitimacy in the fight against the virus and its development post-COVID-19. Apparently, Taiwan and Hong Kong demonstrated a “re-expansion” of their public sector during the public health crisis, but not in the same format. This can be understood based on their varying regime values and administrative systems. The pandemic has been a catalyst, pushing both regimes back to their original track of public administration establishments. The concept of “path dependence” might explain the initial development and project the longer-term transformation of the public sector in both places.

Health promotion strategies often attempt to change people’s behavior through targeting their risk perceptions. These perceptions may, however, be moderated by other factors. This study therefore aimed at investigating the trustworthiness and consistency of risk information, as well as respondent perceptions of the adequacy of amount received among a representative sample of former smokers, and how this information is related to gender, age, education level and whether using nicotine or not.

The respondents are part of a seven-year follow-up of former smokers in Sweden. Initially, 1400 respondents were contacted, whereof 705 (response rate 50%) answered a Web-survey. The majority (85 %) was still nicotine-free but some made use of nicotine in different forms. The data analysis includes descriptive statistics and logistic regressions.

Most respondents trusted risk information whether offered by the public authorities or came from other sources such as media, and generally perceived that there was an adequate amount. However, there were some differences between the products, where quite a few distrusted information on Nicotine Replacement Therapies (NRTs) and some perceived the information on snus and NRTs as contradictory and too little.

Knowledge about how former smokers perceive information regarding negative aspects of cigarette use may facilitate more effective risk communication with current smokers, and it may also be important for communicating information about other nicotine products to those who are trying to or who already have quit smoking.

Even as governments worldwide take extraordinary measures and spend unprecedented amounts of their state budgets to combat COVID-19, tax compliance remains challenging. Therefore, this study employs previously identified predictors to investigate the factors that persuade individual taxpayers to comply with the law.

Individual taxpayers in Indonesia (N = 699) who had experienced COVID-19-related benefits were asked to assess the provided evaluation regarding the tax compliance intention and its determinants. The bootstrapping analysis was employed using smart partial least squares (SmartPLS) to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest that the perceived fiscal exchange, tax morality, tax fairness, tax complexity and the power of authority are significant determinants of tax compliance intention. This study also supports the indirect effects of numerous factors on tax compliance intention through the perceived fiscal exchange and tax morality. In practice, reminding taxpayers of how tax payments fund public services, improving taxpayer morale, increasing the perceived fairness of the tax system, streamlining the tax code and managing the effectiveness of tax administration could all lead to a greater intention to comply with the law.

In addition to highlighting the dynamics of tax compliance amid the unprecedented pandemic crisis, our findings also provide insight into the importance of perceived fiscal exchange and tax morality for achieving and sustaining planned behavior to comply with tax rules.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of the factors that shape tax morale. A large range of random explanatory variables identified in the literature as determinants of tax morale are synthesised and structured by drawing inspiration from the institutional theory.

To do this, a systematic search has been conducted using a library catalogue which provides access to more than 400 databases.

The finding is that the institutional theory provides a suitable theoretical basis to explore tax morale. Indeed, all the factors until now identified as determinants of tax morale (except the control variables/socio-demographic characteristics) can be categorised either as belonging to formal institutions or to informal institutions. The most salient factor is trust, with both vertical and horizontal trust positively related to tax morale.

The outcome is a call for a more nuanced understanding of not only the effect of formal and informal institutions on tax morale but also how formal and informal institutions interact and alter each other and, consequently, affect tax morale.

The paper seeks to encourage governments to start recognising that as low tax morale arises when a gap exists between formal and informal institutions, they need to design policy measures aimed to reduce this gap, rather than persisting with deterrence measures.

This is the first systematic review of the factors that influence tax morale using an institutionalist lens.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the direct and moderating effects of perceived transparency on citizen satisfaction with public healthcare services.

This paper extends the classic framework of service quality, value and satisfaction by adding perceived transparency as an essential component, applies service-dominant logic to develop hypotheses regarding the effects of transparency and empirically tests the extended framework with secondary household survey data on China’s public healthcare.

The classic framework of service quality, value and satisfaction that originated from the private sector is robust in public service. Perceived transparency has a positive impact on perceived value and citizen satisfaction, but the positive effects of service quality and perceived value on citizen satisfaction were weakened with the increasing level of perceived transparency.

Perceived transparency is a double-edged sword regarding citizen satisfaction: although transparency increases perceived value and satisfaction by enhancing citizens’ service co-creation and inspiring citizen confidence, increased transparency raises citizens’ expectations for service products, which subsequently dampens the positive effects of service quality and perceived value on citizen satisfaction.

In a context with higher transparency, local authorities must learn to manage citizen expectations that influence satisfaction, and increase the probability of satisfaction by avoiding too high citizen expectations.

This paper highlights the importance of transparency in enhancing public service co-creation, and contributes a novel perspective on the effects of transparency in the formation of citizen satisfaction, which may serve as the starting point for studying the role of transparency in public affairs.