Previous research has attempted to describe the relationship among concepts of relational community attachment, citizen trust in public service efficiency and effectiveness, and willingness of citizens to pay for public services. Simonsen and Robbins (1999) analyze the relationship between citizens’ use of public services – which is related to their views of the effective provision of public service – and willingness to pay taxes to support the services. Using logistic regression techniques they find a strong relationship between use of services and support for taxes. Glaser, Aristigueta and Miller (2003) examine the results from a citizen survey using analysis of variance techniques to distinguish the individual and interactive effects of self-interest and community in determining willingness to pay for capital investments in education. Most recently, Glaser (2014) reports the results from a citizen survey with several variables representing each of the concepts. He uses regression models to assess the relationships and finds that both relational community and trust play a role in predicting willingness to pay increased taxes for providing public services.

 To our knowledge, however, no previous research has analyzed the question of whether trust plays a mediator role in the relationship between community attachment and the willingness to pay for public services. The methodologies used in previous studies have mostly involved regression approaches, sometimes of individual proxies for the concepts of community, trust, and willingness to pay and sometimes of indexes which were created in an ad hoc nature. These methodologies are not able to detect a mediator role directly and further, the measures used in previous studies have likely been subject to considerable measurement error, something that has not been explored in previous research. We propose to solve both problems in our research through using structural equation modeling (SEM). SEM combines confirmatory factor analysis, which can be used to assess whether the constructs purportedly measured using previous indices have in fact been measuring the latencies that they were supposed to measure. Additionally, we will examine the data to identify the other antecedants of trust in government. Our research is similar in approach to that of Yang (2005), who looks at the role of administrator trust as a mediator in the successful implementation of citizen involvement initiatives.