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.
Do personalist leaders erode public trust in democracy, or are they a symptom of its decline? The election of personalist leaders—whose party cannot effectively check them—and the declining public trust in democracy are often cited as evidence for democratic backsliding. But we lack a theoretical understanding of their dynamics, nor did we have empirical data to examine their relationship globally. This paper, using two novel global datasets based on latent response model, is the first to investigate the causal relations between personalist leaders and public trust in democracy in a long panel of cross-national data.
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.
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.