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Subject ▸ political trust

Comparative Estimates of Public Trust in Government Across 116 Countries, 1973–2020

Political trust plays a critical role in understanding key political questions, including regime support, democratic legitimacy, policy preferences, and political behavior. However, the lack of comparable, cross-national data has limited scholars’ ability to analyze the relationship of political trust with quantities of interest and to generalize findings across different countries and time periods. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Trust in Government (TGOV) Dataset, a time-series cross-sectional resource covering 116 countries from 1973 to 2020.

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