Trust in political institutions in comparative perspective: the role of rational and psychological factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Currently, the scientific literature on political trust continues to be dominated by a rational approach which portrays trust as an evaluation of the effectiveness of institutions and which uses as an empirical basis primarily democratic countries. Such studies are conducted less frequently in non-democratic regimes, which is why political scientists do not have a complete picture of how universal the patterns of political trust formation discovered in democracies actually are. In addition, psychological factors, whose influence on trust may vary depending on the type of regime, remain in the shadow of the rational approach. In this article, the author seeks to fill this research gap and identify similarities and differences in the role of rational and psychological factors in the formation of political institutional trust in democracies and autocracies. To this end, the author analyzes survey data from the 7th wave of the World Value Survey (2017-2022), which surveyed more than 90,000 respondents from around the world. To measure the level of democracy in these countries, the author refers to the V-Dem database and uses the principal component analysis (PCA) to calculate the regime’s democracy index, which allows states to be divided into democratic (18 countries, including Canada, the United States, Germany, Japan, etc.) and authoritarian regimes (22 countries, including Turkey, the Philippines, Iran, Kazakhstan, etc.). The author formulates and tests hypotheses about how the role of factors such as perceived procedural effectiveness, democratic values and psychological needs differs in democracies and autocracies in the institutional trust formation. Empirical analysis revealed that in autocracies, compared to democracies, citizens who rate the democratic nature of elections higher, have more trust in political institutions. At the same time, citizens who believe that corruption is widespread in their country show greater political distrust in democracies than in authoritarian countries. At the same time, in democratic countries, compared to authoritarian ones, citizens who are more prone to the need for an autonomous political climate, trust political institutions more than those whose demand for autonomy is less pronounced. Thus, the results of the study demonstrated the need to take into account the institutional characteristics of different political regimes when analyzing the rational and psychological factors shaping political trust, and outlined the contours for further research in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".