The Routledge Companion to Trust

both in the direction of more trust, and in the direction of less trust and more distrust.Then, we discuss initiatives aimed at increasing trust and reducing distrust between citizens and the public sector, both at the institutional level, and at the level of specific encounters between citizens and public services or public servants.We end by formulating a research agenda to study trust and distrust in and by the public sector, to counter the current scarcity of empirical literature on trust in and by the public sector. Citizen trust in the public sector-signals and evidencePublic sector reforms have often been motivated by a presumed lack of public trust in public services (Bok, 2001;Van de Walle & Bouckaert, 2007).Public services are said to be either inefficient, wasteful and ineffective, or power-hungry with little eye for citizens' needs and desires.Political rhetoric in itself is however insufficient to get a coherent picture of the extent to which citizens actually trust the public sector, public services, and individual public servants.To construct such a picture, one needs to look at various pieces of evidence.In this section we look at several pieces of evidence.First, we discuss attitudes as measured in polls.Then we look at citizen voice, or the ways in which citizens express their discontent.This can range from mere complaining, to going to court, or to becoming outright aggressive during interaction with the public sector.Finally, one can look at exit behaviours, whereby citizens decide to end their relation with the public sector.While trust in the public sector has been at the core of reform debates, the academic literature on trust in the public sector is remarkably scarce. AttitudesCitizen trust in the public sector is traditionally measured through opinion surveys that contain a number of items on the public sector.Changes in political trust have been well documented, yet for trust in public administration, far fewer indicators are available.Established surveys such as the World Values surveys, the American National Election Studies, the European Social Survey, or various Barometers (Eurobarometer, Latinobarómetro, Asia and Asian Barometer) have collected information about attitudes towards a number of specific public services, as well as more general