When do people trust their government?
C. A. E. Goodhart and
Ly Hoang Vu
LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library
Abstract:
There has been widespread concern about the decrease in trust in government and the need to regain it. Policymakers and researchers have been working on reasons for this, and how to reverse it. In this study, we rely on a recent sample prepared by the World Values Survey, wave 7. It includes over 81,000 observations across 52 countries for the years 2017 - 22. Our study offers three main findings. The first is that economic growth plays a crucial role in determining trust in government, and its importance appears consistent across all regions. The second is the presence of a "Trust Paradox," whereby trust in government tends to be lower in fully democratic countries compared to single-party states, with the exception of Latin America. The third is that migration generally is positively related to trust in government. We explain this by noting that, historically, this has often been the case; however, when inward migration exceeds a certain threshold, the effect on trust often shifts.
Keywords: democracy; economic growth; immigration; media; trust in government; trust paradox (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 A13 E10 H10 J61 L82 O11 P50 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127880/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:127880
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().