A blessing and a curse? Political institutions in the growth and decay of generalized trust: a cross-national panel analysis, 1980-2009.

ABSTRACT: Despite decades of research on social capital, studies that explore the relationship between political institutions and generalized trust-a key element of social capital-across time are sparse. To address this issue, we use various cross-national public-opinion data sets including the World Values Survey and employ pooled time-series OLS regression and fixed- and random-effects estimation techniques on an unbalanced panel of 74 countries and 248 observations spread over a 29-year time period. With these data and methods, we investigate the impact of five political-institutional factors-legal property rights, market regulations, labor market regulations, universality of socioeconomic provisions, and power-sharing capacity-on generalized trust. We find that generalized trust increases monoto

SUBMITTER: Robbins BG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3338835 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature