We use a unique data set of trust game replications in order to validate the commonly used “trust” question from the World Values Survey. We find that trust as measured by the World Values Survey is positively correlated with experimentally measured trust and unrelated to experimentally...

Institutional design balances the costs and benefits of dictatorship and disorder. Democracy can be efficient if it improves the performance of government. Yet, sometimes authoritarian governments can be efficient if they reduce disorder. We show that democratization has a nonlinear effect on...

Our study focuses on two research questions. The first is what is government effectiveness? This relates to how we measure government effectiveness or performance in terms of the whole government, not just in terms of an agency or several networked agencies. The second research question is how...