certificates in the mid-1990s and over time this has dropped to 3% of lustration submissions.
Poland, of the 23,000 lustration declarations from 1999-2002 and all together 85 cases were
brought before the Lustration Court. This means that in 85 cases additional investigation about
the veracity or accuracy of the lustration declaration was merited, but does not mean that 85
people were actually removed from office.
Hungarian figures are not available, but there is a
general sense of bureaucratic continuity rather than change in administrative personnel.
Contentions that the competency and therefore the trustworthiness of public institutions
would be compromised as a result of personnel changes are unfounded. Trust decisions are a
function of assessments of competency, interests, and incentives. The more apparent danger to
trustworthiness of public institutions lies not in competency concerns but in concerns over the
interests and incentives of public officials. Given that vetting does not undermine competency
and instead encapsulates the interests of the new personnel officials, it appears that vetting
provides an institutional safeguard on the actions of government officials. As such it is an
important contracting device promoting the trustworthiness of the new public institutions.
Assessing the Interests of Government and Public Institutions
Assessing the interests of the government is an important component of trustworthiness.
Is the government dedicated to the goals of good governance? If good governance is defined in
terms of fairness, objectivity, accountability and transparency, is the government acting in a way
to signal to citizens that its interests are true? Assessing the interests of public institutions is
difficult because it involves assessing not just the objective capacity indicators, but also
assessing the subtle cues and symbolic actions which indicate underlying interests. Determining
if public institutions appear to have the interests of the citizens and the goal of good governance
68
Priban, p. 17.
69
Czarnota, pp. 16-17.
29
Convention