Eco&Stat n°01-2025 - Does Quality of Governance Increase Trust in Politics and Institutions?

This paper tests the OECD conceptual framework of trust in institutions. We use the survey on trust in institutions administered by the OECD in 18 countries in 2021. Employing a structural equation model, we estimate a confirmatory factor model for three underlying dimensions: trust in politics, trust in institutions, and quality of governance. These factors’ scores are then used in a regression analysis in order to systematically explore socioeconomic determinants such as age, gender, and education level, and compare the findings to those of the 2022 OECD report. Our study corroborates almost all the sociodemographic effects on trust described in the report. Furthermore, our study highlights the important role of quality of governance as a robust predictor of overall trust levels. Finally, to check the robustness of the OLS regressions, we also employ a distributional regression approach using non-parametric regressions (re-centered influence functions). Our findings reveal clear patterns: at lower quantiles of trust, gender, education level, and income exhibit positive and significant relationships. Conversely, at higher quantiles, and particularly the 0.90 quantile, their impact shifts to a negative association. These results underscore the importance of checking non-linear associations, which may yield markedly different outcomes compared to traditional OLS frameworks.