Determinants of Institutional Trust: The Role of the Cultural Context

The purpose of this multilevel analysis is to examine the possible impact of cultural context on institutional trust, the level of trust people have towards institutions. The main novelty lies in adding cultural dimensions to the factors widely analysed in the literature so far: institutional performance and social or interpersonal trust. The cultural context is operationalised using the up-to-date indicators of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The individual-level data from two waves of the European Social Survey (2008 and 2010) were complemented with regional-level data from multiple sources and analysed with the help of multilevel regression analysis. The results show that besides social trust, corruption perception and institutional quality, cultural context matters as well, although not all cultural dimensions are relevant for institutional trust. From the dimensions analysed, power distance proved to have negative relationship with institutional trust. Also, it appeared that the society-level context also matters for how the individual-level institutional trust is related to social trust and corruption perception.

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