The TiGRE large-scale survey examines trust between actors involved in the regulatory regimes for data protection, financial services and food safety. The survey was fielded in nine European countries and at the EU level. Respondents, selected for their expertise within the abovementioned sectors, work at organisations that encompass the entire regulatory regime – from legislators to regulatory agencies to regulated organisations. The dataset, comprising of 1,484 unique observations, provides crucial cross-country, cross-sector insight into trust in European regulatory governance.

This info sheet focuses on the results from survey responses in the nine countries and highlights key findings.

Check our outcomes page for the download link, and enjoy reading!

The UAntwerpen team from TiGRE has published an article in Regulation & Governance entitled "What drives compliance with COVID-19 measures over time? Explaining changing impacts with Goal Framing Theory".

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study which factors drive compliance and how the evolving context in society – virus fluctuations and changing government measures – changes the impact of these factors. Extant literature lists many factors that drive compliance – notably enforcement, trust, legitimacy. Most of these studies, however, do not look across time: whether a changing context for citizens changes the impact of factors driving compliance. In this study, we use Lindenberg’s Goal Framing Theory to explain the dynamics of these drivers of compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic. We formulate hypotheses for pro-socialness, trust in government, observed respect for rules, rule effectiveness, rule appropriateness, fear of COVID-19 (severity and proximity), opportunities for pleasure and happiness as well as worsened income position. We test our hypotheses with data collected at three different moments during the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in Flanders, Belgium. Findings show that over time the constellations of factors that drive compliance change and, later in the pandemic, more distinct groups of citizens with different motivations to comply are identified. The overall conclusion is that the voluntary basis for compliance becomes more fragile over time, with a more differentiated pattern of drivers of compliance emerging. Public policy and communication need to adapt to these changes over time and address different groups of citizens.

The full article is available for download at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co...

Tobias Bach, TiGRE consortium member at University of Oslo, has a vacant position for a postdoctoral fellow in the project “Public leadership, organizational performance, and trust in government” (PART) funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The project focuses on the professional background of chief executives in government agencies and SOEs and how sector switching affects organizational performance, employee priorities and motivation, and citizens’ trust. The project will be using career data, document analysis, and survey experiments with citizens and bureaucrats.

The appointment is for a fixed period of 4 years, with a 25% teaching requirement, and with excellent working conditions and high quality of life. The application deadline is 1st November 2021. Applicants have to submit a research proposal that contributes to the broader research agenda of the project. More information can be found here.

The TiGRE project organised its first Stakeholder Forum meeting to present and discuss the results of our large-scale survey on trust in regulation. This meeting was organised online on 10 June 2021 and gathered multiple actors involved in the regulation of three high-value sectors: food safety, finance and data protection.

A short report summarising the key points discussed during the meeting is available for download here.

We are looking forward for the second Stakeholder Forum meeting: date, purpose and format will come in due time!

Discover our first summary for publication, including a description of the project and the results achieved in the first year of TiGRE.

The summary is available for download on the Outcomes page of the TiGRE website: enjoy reading! 

We are happy to share the first project deliverables:

• Deliverable 1.1 — David Levi-Faur et al. Report on trust in government, politics, policy and regulatory governance.
• Deliverable 1.2 — Libby Maman et al. Report on meta-analysis of empirical trust studies and data sources
• Deliverable 1.3 — David Levi-Faur et al.. Report on a regulatory regime perspective on trust and the analysis of the regulatory regimes’ structure in the involved countries

These major outputs are available for download on the TiGRE outcomes page.

On 10 June 2021, the TiGRE project organised its first Stakeholder Forum meeting to present and discuss the results of our large-scale survey on trust in regulation (read more about the survey here). This meeting has gathered several practitioners and actors involved in the regulation of three high-value sectors: food safety, finance and data protection.

Despite the online format, TiGRE members have engaged in a stimulating discussion with the invited practitioners.

We warmly thank all participants for their time, feedback and advice!

We are looking forward for the second Stakeholder Forum meeting: date, purpose and format will come soon!

Our fourth TiGRE Consortium Meeting CM4 was held on 10 and 11 June, as a virtual event due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The progress achieved so far and the work for the coming months was discussed with all partners. In particular, UiO kindly shared the preliminary results coming out from our large-scale survey (read more about the survey here).

We also had the chance to discuss and receive feedback from our external advisors, Prof. Nikiforos Diamandouros (Academy of Athens), Prof. Itzhak Galnoor (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), Anna Pietikainen (OECD Network of Economic Regulators) and Prof. Vincent Martenet (University of Lausanne). Discover our Advisory Board by clicking here.

“In this survey experiment we explore how different enforcement styles affect citizens’ trust in six countries in a rigorous way. The large scale of this cross-national experiment allows us to also explore contextual differences across countries and between domains”, says Dr. S. Grimmelikhuijsen, Associate Professor at Utrecht University.

A description of the TiGRE study on the drivers of citizens’ trust in regulatory agencies and regulated organisations has been developed and is available for download, as a single page, printer-friendly PDF info sheet.

Check our outcomes page for the download link, and enjoy reading!

Our large-scale survey, which closed on 29 March 2021, gathered approximately 1,500 responses from actors involved in the regulatory regimes of different sectors and countries covered by TiGRE: read our infosheet about the design of the survey here.

We are currently preparing and cleaning the large dataset, alongside a research report which will describe the trust relationships among actors and identify the drivers of trust dynamics.

We warmly thank all survey participants for their time and answers, which are crucial for the progress of the TiGRE project!