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Individual trust and quality of regional government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2021

Rosetta Lombardo Open the ORCID record for Rosetta Lombardo [Opens in a new window]  and
Fernanda Ricotta
Rosetta Lombardo*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Statistics and Finance ‘G. Anania’, University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, 87036, Arcavacata di Rende, Cosenza, Italy
Fernanda Ricotta
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Statistics and Finance ‘G. Anania’, University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci, 87036, Arcavacata di Rende, Cosenza, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Email: rosetta.lombardo@unical.it
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Abstract

The impact of trust on economic performance has been widely explored, but the reasons for its variability across countries are not well understood. We analyse the effect of the quality of government at the regional level on individual generalized trust in a multi-country context across regions in Europe. Social phenomena are often subnational and a number of public services are provided at a subnational level; the trust of individuals living in the same country may, therefore, differ by region depending also on the quality of the local government. As a proxy of the quality of institutions, we use the European Quality of Government Index, calculated at the regional level over 27 European Union (EU) countries. The analysis conducted on data extracted from the European Social Survey 2012 refers to 142 regions from 15 EU member states. Considering the clustered nature of the data, a multilevel approach is used. The findings show that living in a region with high-quality local government positively influences individual trust. This positive association survives the inclusion of several contextual regional variables.

Keywords

Trustregional insitutionsEuropean regionsmultilevel model
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 18 , Issue 5 , October 2022 , pp. 745 - 766
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Millennium Economics Ltd.

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