Social Trust, Normative Expectations, and Institutional Confidence

The present paper analyzes determinants of confidence in public institutions. In both theoretical literature and empirical research, a link between social trust and institutional confidence has been established. The present paper casts additional light on this relationship. Our analysis also draws on Warren's (1996) argument that institutional trust is based on citizens' perceptions of how well institutions live up to normative expectations held by the public. Our focus on such normative expectations as uncorruptedness and honesty is different from much of the previous empirical work which often predominantly focuses on policy outputs, such as economic performance, as a determinant of political support. We exploit data from the second round of the European Social Survey. Two main hypotheses derived from the theoretical discussion are tested in the analysis. 1) Generalized social trust is positively associated with institutional trust, because social trust involves the belief that individuals operating within institutions are trustworthy. 2) Perceptions of the extent to which institutions live up to such normative expectations as uncorruptedness and honesty explain the extent to which they are trusted. The analyses are first carried out at a country level and later at an individual level. The aggregated level of social trust and the level of corruption for each country are used in order to test whether the patterns of institutional trust are similar regardless of country context. The hypotheses are verified to a large extent; even though the most powerful determinant of institutional confidence proves to be satisfaction with policy outputs. Institutional trust is in general associated with social trust as well as with the perception that public officials act honestly, and the pattern is similar regarding trust in both democratic and implementing institutions. Further, the analysis suggests that the societies' average levels of social trust and corruption do not affect the causal mechanisms of institutional trust at the individual level