Global public opinion toward international institutions seems to be shaky these days. For example, some people trust the World Health Organization but not others during the Covid-19 pandemic. The public becomes more suspicious of the United Nations as the world observes the challenge of the organization to maintain peace when a permanent member of the Security Council initiates war. Despite the importance of the issue, there have been only a few systematic studies of the factors that shape public trust in international organizations.
Trust in civil servants is essential for effective governance, enabling policy implementation, public service delivery, and compliance. However, the lack of comparable cross-national data on trust in bureaucracy has limited our ability to systematically examine these relationships. To address this gap, we develop the Trust in Civil Servants (TCS) dataset using an advanced latent-variable modeling technique, using 132 national and cross-national surveys from 98 countries (1986-2022). Our measures reveal variations in trust both within and between countries.
Political trust plays a central role in understanding and theorizing any essential political question, such as regime support, democratic support, and policy preferences. However, we know little about the effects of different types of political trust on policy outcomes. In this study, I examine the relationship between trust in policy-making institutions, trust in policy-implementing institutions, and immunization rates using time-series cross-sectional data. I measure the two types of trust by employing a sophisticated Bayesian Item Response Theory model on 2,108 national surveys covering 150 countries over 47 years.