Corruption Exposure, Political Trust, and Immigrants

Cevat Giray Aksoy, Barry Eichengreen, Anastasia Litina (), Cem Özgüzel () and Chan Yu ()
Additional contact information
Cem Özgüzel: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) a, https://sites.google.com/view/cemozguzel/home
Chan Yu: University of International Business and Economics, https://sites.google.com/view/yu-chan/home
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Cem Ozguzel

Discussion Paper Series from Department of Economics, University of Macedonia

Abstract: Scholars and politicians have expressed concern that immigrants from countries with low levels of political trust transfer those attitudes to their destination countries. Using large-scale survey data covering 38 countries and exploiting origin-country variation across different cohorts and surveys, we show that, to the contrary, immigrants more exposed to institutional corruption before migrating exhibit higher levels of political trust in their new country. Higher trust is observed for national political institutions only and does not carry over to other supra-national institutions and individuals. We report evidence that higher levels of political trust among immigrants persist, leading to greater electoral participation and political engagement in the long run. The impact of home-country corruption on political trust in the destination country is further amplified by large differences in levels of income and democracy between home and host countries, which serve to highlight the contrast in the two settings. It is lessened by exposure to media, a source of independent information about institutional quality. Finally, our extensive analyses indicate that self-selection into host countries based on trust is highly unlikely and the results also hold when focusing only on forced migrants who were unlikely to have been subject to selection.

Keywords: Corruption; Institutions; Immigrants; Political Trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-06, Revised 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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http://econwp.uom.gr/pdf/dp082024.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Corruption exposure, political trust, and immigrants (2025)
Working Paper: Corruption Exposure, Political Trust, and Immigrants (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mcd:mcddps:2024_08

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