A Cross-National Study of the Relationship Between Quality of Government, Level of Corruption, and Levels of Institutional and Social Trust

Corruption has different effects in society including erosion of political legitimacy, justifying injustice, and weakening social and institutional trusts. On the other hand, quality of government has been introduced as a key factor in combating corruption and rise of trust. Decreasing level of trust also create a self-reinforcing process which rises corruption through more readiness for committing corrupted activities. Then corruption and trust create a positive feedback process which strength each other and erode quality of government. Corruption causes less productive use of public resources and spending, inadequate incentives for investment, low quality decisions, and eroding social capital. It seems the starting point for dealing with corruption is quality of government. Quality of government including trustworthiness, impartiality and rationality in political and government institutions. While Bo Rothstein (2012) argues for the key role of quality of government for trust, Robert Putnam insists on quality and quantity of civil society. He argues that civil society creates social trust resulted in quality of government and reducing corruption. Rothstein and Putnam are representatives of top-down and bottom-up approach for explaining social trust and corruption. This article considers the relationship between level of corruption and the degree of social and institutional trusts. The main hypothesis is that a good-quality government increases social and institutional trusts by reducing level of corruption.

This paper uses secondary data. Transparency International, ICRG corruption index, the index of corruption of Institution of Global Competition and Bertelsmann's corruption index, together have created a non-corruption index based on factor analysis. Data on trust have been adopted from Inglehart’s WVS. Inglehart's trust data have been used in three categories: institutional trust, social trust and participation in civil society. Data on independent variable, index of good governance (WGI) including (Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, rule of low) have been obtained from World Bank Governance Indicators Project (2007-2011). Data from 43 countries, countries that all data on them were available, were used to analyze the hypothesis. All data have been analyzed by quantitative regression method and path analyses. Cluster analyses used to classify countries based on score in good governance, level of corruption, social and institutional trust, and trust in political, social and cultural institutions.

Findings show that countries with less corruption have higher levels of social and institutional trusts. Bivariate Pearson correlation analyses show that government efficiency is correlated with non-corruption (0.935) at 0.999 significance level. There is not a significant correlation between government efficiency and trust in voluntary, non-governmental organizations. Path analyses using AMOS shows that quality of government operationalized through WGI causes less corruption and lower levels of corruption rises trust in social and political dimensions. The reverse effect of non-corruption on trust in cultural institution could be analyzed as a cultural matter. Countries with high levels of quality of government are secular ones and with pluralized media environment. Secular orientation toward cultural institutions and pluralism in media create a pessimistic approach toward cultural institutions. These results verify findings of another cross-national variable oriented research. Our analyses show that efficient institutions and governance could ameliorate level of corruption and lead to rising trust, which in turn, strengthen quality of government. In sum, it can be argued that if people believe that government institutions are corrupted, their mistrust will increase. Mistrust in institutions increases readiness for corrupted actions. If people are committed to ethical codes of conduct but corruption stays a reliable option for solving problems, people neglect ethical codes in the final decision for action.