A quantitative systematic review of governance practices and public trust in local governments across emerging and developing contexts

Abstract

Declining public trust poses a critical challenge to local administrations; however, empirical evidence regarding its antecedents remains fragmented. This systematic literature review synthesizes quantitative evidence to evaluate the relationship between core governance practices, transparency, accountability, responsiveness, participation, and public trust in local governments. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this study’s systematic database search covered the literature published between 2010 and 2025. Although the search window covered the last 15 years, no quantitative studies meeting the sub-national eligibility criteria were identified prior to 2017, yielding a final corpus of 18 quantitative empirical studies published between 2017 and 2025. The synthesis reveals that responsiveness is the most consistent and strongly associated with trust, supporting performance-based legitimacy theory at the local level. Conversely, transparency and accountability exhibit conditional relationships; transparency is ineffective without service delivery, while formal accountability mechanisms occasionally show negative associations, suggesting symbolic compliance to the law. Governance practices show indirect relationships with trust through variables such as citizen satisfaction, perceived performance, and effectiveness. This study suggests that local trust is closely related to administrative competence and tangible results rather than being directly correlated with procedural mandates. While focused primarily on high-need, transitioning environments (e.g., Somalia, Ethiopia, Nepal, Indonesia, and China), the review incorporates comparative insights from institutionalized settings (Switzerland, Japan, and Israel) to highlight how baseline trust shapes governance evaluations.