Trust in government, institutional quality and the perception of water services

This study examines how institutional trust and governance quality shape citizens’ evaluations of water services. Drawing on psychological and institutional theories, we develop a multilevel framework linking individual trust in public authorities to regional governance performance. Using multilevel logistic models and pooled data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) Multipurpose Household Survey (2014–2019), combined with a regional Institutional Quality Index, we show that trust in local institutions is the strongest predictor of perceived service quality. At the contextual level, higher government effectiveness and control of corruption are associated with more favourable perceptions. These findings suggest that institutional trust operates as a heuristic under limited observability, while governance conditions shape the context in which such evaluations are formed.