Institutional trust, Public Universities and Political Socialization in the Islamic Republic of Iran

In this paper, we try to examine the relationship between the three concepts of institutional trust, university, and political socialization. Institutional trust is one of the most important assets and needs of each institution to advance its functions. On the other hand, one of the most important functions of written and non-written of public universities in the Islamic Republic of Iran is to influence the process of political socialization of their main audience, students. The main issue of this article is that institutional trust as the most important indicator of social capital has a significant effect on the political socialization of undergraduate students at Tehran's public universities as a statistical society of this research. Postulating the theory of Robert Putnam on the concept of social capital, this article propounds this hypothesis that political socialization in every society carried out mainly through state institutions and the amount of citizen's trust to state institutions, which is called institutional trust and is one of the most important elements of social capital, is very important in the implementation process and the effectiveness of political socialization. Study of statistical findings in the case study of this study showed that with increasing institutional trust in public universities in Tehran, their effectiveness in increasing the political socialization of undergraduate students increase.