Corruption Exposure, Political Trust, and Immigrants

Cevat Giray Aksoy, Barry Eichengreen, Anastasia Litina, Özgüzel, Cem and Chan Yu

No 19775, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

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 survey rounds, 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 information about institutional quality. Finally, our extensive analyses indicate that self-selection into host countries based on trust is highly unlikely and the results hold even when focusing only on forced migrants who were unlikely to have been subject to selection.

Keywords: Corruption; Institutions; Immigrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19775 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19775

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP19775

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().