The Paradox of Compliance: Procedural Signal Saturation and Conditional Distrust in Public Organizations

Public organizations communicate procedural compliance through audits, certifications, and disclosures, but additional communication need not increase trust. This conceptual article asks when repeated procedural signals cease to improve audience judgments and may contribute to distrust. A problem-oriented synthesis connects signaling, bounded rationality, institutional decoupling, procedural justice, and public value research, with persuasion knowledge providing an attributional bridge. Procedural signal saturation is proposed as a condition in which repetition supplies little additional usable information relative to available attention. Saturation alone predicts diminishing informational returns. Distrust requires an additional inference that repetitive self-justification evades a salient concern. This audience pathway is distinguished from an organizational pathway in which reporting demands displace responsiveness. Five propositions specify these relationships and a conditional feedback process termed the Compliance Trap. A measurement framework separates conduct, exposure, processing, attribution, trust, and legitimacy. Existing research informs the mechanism’s components without establishing the complete sequence. The contribution is a bounded account of repeated compliance evidence that specifies contrasting predictions for information uptake and intent attribution, while retaining inattention, performance disappointment, and means–ends decoupling as alternative explanations.