Abstract

The causal relationship between trust and corruption has sparked heated scholarly debates. This study holistically explores the impacts of three typical forms of trust, namely, general, particular, and institutional trust, on the level of corruption across countries. Furthermore, it advances the extant literature by examining how the three types of trust moderate the impacts of formal institutions on corruption. This study draws on a cross-national dataset and uses the two-stage least-squares (2SLS) method to address endogeneity bias in the causal relationship between trust and corruption. As shown by the results, the impacts of the three forms of trust on corruption level are conditional on the efficiency of rules, and the function of rules is also dependent on trust. Specifically, general and institutional trust reinforce the positive effects of rule efficiency on corruption containment, while particular trust undermines the positive effects.

Citation

Tu, W. Trust and corruption: how different forms of trust interact with formal institutions. GPPG 3, 160–179 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-023-00061-6