Anticorruption audits may deter corruption and signal to citizens that institutions are proactively combating it. However, by detecting and reporting corruption, audits might also unintentionally erode trust in institutions. Therefore, the impact of audits potentially hinges on whether they uncover corruption. Audit institutions, not implicated in the corruption they uncover, might be less likely to experience a decline in trust compared to auditee institutions. This study uses survey and administrative data from Brazil, leveraging a federal anti-corruption program that randomly selects municipalities for auditing. Results do not support the claim that audits boost institutional trust. Individuals in audited municipalities show no different levels of trust in local government or the audit institution than those in non-audited municipalities, and the coefficients may even indicate a negative effect. Additionally, audit institutions may not be better insulated from the corrosive effects of uncovering corruption than the institutions they audit.

This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.

This article discusses the results and prospects of the market reform in Dutch health care which came into force in 2006. Attention is paid to the results of the health insurance reform, the experience with the shift from passive to active purchasing and the impact of the reform on healthcare provision and cost control respectively. Other topics discussed are the consequences of the reform for administrative costs, institutional trust in health insurance, and the power balance in health care after reform. The central message is that the high expectations of the market reform have not come true. Dutch health care features a high degree of hybridity and there are indications that the system is becoming ever more hybrid: the system operates much less market-like than the market frame suggests. Currently, the policy narrative on the reform is changing. Policymakers and policy documents underscore the need for cooperation in provider networks and more state direction. The Dutch experience with health care reform illustrates the pendulum theory. After a period of a belief in competition and less state direction the pendulum in policymaking swings back to a belief in cooperation and a pro-active role of the state.

This paper draws on macroeconomics, the economics of institutions and the economics of trust to explain private savings at the national level for 33 OECD (mostly European) countries from 2002 to 2012. More specifically, it raises two questions: (i) is it the quality of institutions or trust in institutions that drives private savings? (ii) if trust matters, what is the appropriate institutional level at which it operates? To answer these questions, we add to the usual explanatory variables of private savings three measures of institutional quality and six measures of institutional trust, distributed between the following institutional levels, presented in assumed hierarchical order: political, legal, financial and social. We find that trust in political institutions is the most significant driver of private savings. This contributes to the literature underlining the importance of subjectivity in social and economic phenomena and suggests, for private bank savings in countries having highly regulated banking systems, the existence of a hierarchy of trust in which trust in the highest-ranking institutions (political – and to a lesser extent legal – institutions) acts as a substitute for trust in every lower-ranking institution (financial institutions and social trust).

The three-child policy constitutes a hotly debated socio-political issue in China. Upon its announcement, many Chinese citizens have ridiculed the move on social media. Adopting the cognitive mediation model and the influence of presumed influence theory, this study examines how social media exposure to three-child policy-related news and discussions could affect the Chinese public’s attitudes toward the policy. The online survey results show that social media exposure negatively predicts supportive opinion via cognitive elaboration and three types of perceived negative effects of the policy (i.e., perceived negative effects on self, on the public, and on females) in serial. It also finds that institutional trust moderates the relationship between cognitive elaboration and policy support. Only among people with high institutional trust, there is a positive effect of social media exposure on supportive opinion through cognitive elaboration.

In this study, we conceptualize the thus far little explored relationship between expatriate and host country as a form of social exchange governed by the norm of reciprocity. Drawing from social exchange theory and our analysis of 451 self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) living and working in the United Arab Emirates, we examine whether the degree of SIEs’ career and community embeddedness explains their host country withdrawal intention via enhanced perceived institutional trust and a more tolerant attitude toward workplace discrimination. Our results provide general support for our theoretical model and most of our hypotheses. In this way, our article makes three contributions. First, it suggests a novel way to conceptualize the relationship between SIEs and host country as a form of social exchange. Second, it differentiates between two dimensions of embeddedness and explicates how the two contribute to SIEs’ intentions to stay in the host country. Finally, the analysis theorizes and empirically tests two previously little explored mechanisms of enhanced institutional trust and a more tolerant attitude toward workplace discrimination through which SIEs’ host country embeddedness influences their host country withdrawal intentions.

How does repression on opposition protests affect citizens' institutional trust under dictatorships? There has been a burgeoning literature investigating empirically both long- and short-term impacts of protests and their repression on citizens' political preferences in both democratic and nondemocratic contexts. Yet, the literature tells us relatively little about how the above question could be answered. This paper tries to answer this question by taking advantage of a recent natural experiment in Hong Kong when Beijing suddenly adopted the National Security Law (NSL) in June 2020 to repress dissidents' protest mobilization. Our findings are twofold. First of all, the NSL drove a wedge in the Hong Kong society by making the pro-establishment camp more satisfied with the post-NSL institutions on the one hand, while alienating the pro-democracy camp who lost tremendous trust in them on the other. Second, our study also reveals that one's trust in institutions is significantly associated with the regimes' ability to curb protesters' contentious mobilization. The Hong Kongers who had higher confidence in the NSL to rein in protests would also have a greater level of trust than those who didn't. The effect, however, is substantially smaller among pro-democracy Hong Kongers except for their trust in monitoring institutions. As Beijing is transforming Hong Kong's current institutions from within hopes of bringing about a new political equilibrium, our study helps provide a timely assessment of Hong Kong's institutional landscape and sheds light on how likely this strategy can work.

While official science has given its answer to the question on the origin of the Coronavirus (animal to human transmission), alternative theories on human creation of the virus – purposely or inadvertently – have flourished. Those alternative theories can be easily located among the family of conspiracy theories, as they always assume some secretive activity of some groups acting on their self-interest and against the good of the many. The article assesses the prevalence of these beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, studies its development during the pandemic, and investigates its potential determinants. In particular, it analyses the relationship between beliefs in alternative theories on the origin of the virus and political orientation, by arguing that the association cannot be attributed to (politically) motivated reasoning, as the issue has not been highly politicized in the Italian context. Alternatively, the article suggests that the main factor driving beliefs in alternative accounts on the origins of the virus is institutional trust. Political orientation moderates its effects, depending on specific conditions (e.g. cue taking, position of the supported party either in government or opposition), and eventually reinforcing scepticism towards epistemic authorities for those with low trust in institutions. Data come from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 survey, carried out with daily samples from April to July 2020 (N > 15.000) to monitor the development of the Italian public opinion during the Coronavirus pandemic.

We examine the cultural context for individual's trust in public institutions. To shed some light on possible cultural explanations from a more comparative perspective and cover a wider set of cultural aspects, we use indicators of cultural dimensions by Kaasa et al. (2014) based on Hofstede's (1980) approach. Multilevel regression analysis is conducted with individual-level data from two waves of the European Social Survey (2008, 2010) and regional-level data from multiple sources. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to construct the indicators of social and institutional trust and corruption. Our results suggest that individuals tend to trust institutions less in regions with large power distance. Hence, an important key for governments being more successful in achieving their aims seems to be related to improving the sense of participation and civic responsibility.

This study examined if and for whom prosecution of politicians for hate speech undermines support for the legal system and democracy. Three research designs were combined to investigate the case of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who was convicted for hate speech against minorities in 2016. First, an experiment showed that observing a guilty verdict decreased support among ‘assimilationists’ who oppose the multicultural society. This deterioration of support was found among the entire group of assimilationists, regardless of whether they voted for Wilders. Secondly, a quasi-experiment demonstrated that assimilationists who were interviewed after Wilders' conviction indicated less support than those who were interviewed before the verdict and compared to a pre-test. Thirdly, a nine-year panel study suggested that these effects accumulate into long-term discontent. This case therefore demonstrates that hate speech prosecution can damage the democratic system it is intended to defend.

Individualistic values are often presented as promoting economic development; however, their links to relevant behaviour and preferences at the micro-level remain under-explored. Here we investigate the relationship between individualistic values and personal attitudes towards reporting corruption. Unlike much of the previous research which focuses on attitudes towards corruption, we analyse the micro-level mechanisms relating to one's willingness to escape the status quo and act against corruption. We also focus on a region associated with persistently high levels of perceived corruption. Our findings indicate that individualism is associated with a greater likelihood to act against corruption. The effect estimated is small but highly significant and robust to changes in estimators and specifications. We also find evidence that institutional trust and individualism strengthen each other to generate greater willingness to report corruption.

Democracies without democrats are not sustainable. Yet, recent studies have argued that Western citizens are turning their backs on the system of self-governance, thereby eroding the societal foundations of consolidated democracies. This study contributes to discussions about citizen support of democracy by (1) analyzing new cross-national survey data in 18 European countries that facilitate assessments of the temporal and geographical generalizability of previous findings, (2) disentangling age, cohort and period effects, thereby aligning the analytical methods with the theoretical arguments and (3) transparently reporting all evidence derived from pre-registered analyses to avoid cherry-picked findings. The findings show that citizens of consolidated democracies continue to endorse self-governance. Yet in some (but not all) countries, there is evidence of a growing number of ‘democrats in name only’, particularly among the young generation. These findings suggest a second phase in research on democratic fatigue that broadens the analytical scope for the multi-faceted nature of democratic support.

This article calls for a sociological understanding of the importance of trust to aged care. It connects existing theories of trust to empirical evidence from gerontology and nursing research. Trust is defined as a response to and management of social vulnerability. It is argued this makes trust a fundamental concept for understanding human service and social care institutions, including aged care. In light of Australia's Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, as well as generational shifts in consumer expectations and care ethics, the article highlights four distinct yet interrelated forms of trust: interpersonal, institutional, organisational and public trust. All of these forms are shown to be critical in conceptualising and evaluating the perceived trust deficit facing contemporary aged-care systems, and existing evidence shows how these forms of trust can reinforce, conflict and misalign with each other. Efforts to rebuild trust in aged care at an organisational and institutional level should ensure mechanisms facilitate rather than hinder the formation of interpersonal trust relations between individual service users, their families and aged care staff. Broader social policy reforms must also consider and address the way cultural understandings of ageing, and media representations of aged care, have diminished the public's trust in the sector, and how the cycle of scandals, reviews and piecemeal reforms contributes to this.

The Internet has played important roles in driving political changes around the world. Why does it help to topple political regimes in some places but improve the quality of governance in others? We found Internet usage in general leads to citizens’ distrust in political institutions. Different political environments, however, can condition such trust-eroding impacts of the Internet in significantly different ways. A democracy enables citizens to connect their online behaviors and offline expression and organization, releasing political discontent while facilitating state–society communication. On the contrary, by restricting various forms of off-line expression, authoritarian regimes drive Internet-active citizens' discontent and distrust to higher levels. We use the World Values Survey data to establish these different mechanisms across democracies and authoritarian systems. Entropy balancing shows our findings to be highly robust.