A Blessing and a Curse? Political Institutions in the Growth and Decay of Generalized Trust: A Cross-National Panel Analysis, 1980–2009

Abstract

Despite decades of research on social capital, studies that explore the relationship between political institutions and generalized trust–a key element of social capital–across time are sparse. To address this issue, we use various cross-national public-opinion data sets including the World Values Survey and employ pooled time-series OLS regression and fixed- and random-effects estimation techniques on an unbalanced panel of 74 countries and 248 observations spread over a 29-year time period. With these data and methods, we investigate the impact of five political-institutional factors–legal property rights, market regulations, labor market regulations, universality of socioeconomic provisions, and power-sharing capacity–on generalized trust. We find that generalized trust increases monotonically with the quality of property rights institutions, that labor market regulations increase generalized trust, and that power-sharing capacity of the state decreases generalized trust. While generalized trust increases as the government regulation of credit, business, and economic markets decreases and as the universality of socioeconomic provisions increases, both effects appear to be more sensitive to the countries included and the modeling techniques employed than the other political-institutional factors. In short, we find that political institutions simultaneously promote and undermine generalized trust.

Income Inequality, Life Satisfaction Inequality and Trust: A Cross Country Panel Analysis

“…As institutional variables, we include religion (Christianity and Islam) (Steijn and Lancee 2011), political rights, civil liberty, and monarchy. Monarchies are deemed to be more trusting, having a more stable political system and less need for full democratic accountability (Bergh and Bjørnskov 2014;Bjørnskov 2005;Bjørnskov et al 2007;Robbins 2012). As demographic variables, we include the share of population aged 65 and above, the population dependency ratio and infant mortality ratio (Bjørnskov et al 2008;Ovaska and Takashima 2010;Barone and Mocetti 2016).…”

Social trust, institutional and political constraints on the executive and deregulation of markets

“…REG, as source of social trust is rather weak. According to Robbins (2012) regulation of credit markets and business operations are not sources of social trust. In contrast, the latter may depend on the extent of labor market regulation.…”

Cooperation without Culture? The Null Effect of Generalized Trust on Intentional Homicide: A Cross-National Panel Analysis, 1995–2009

“…With this data, I followed the WVS wave structure and compiled a three-wave unbalanced panel spanning 15 years (1995–1998, 1999–2004, 2005–2009). I then aggregated generalized trust responses to create a measure of the proportion of respondents – multiplied by 100– who said that most people can be trusted (ranging from 0 to 100) when asked the following question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” This is the prevailing measure of generalized trust used in the social sciences [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27]. All generalized trust data were frequency weighted when available (e.g., WVS S017).…”