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Trust in political institutions in comparative perspective:
the role of rational and psychological factors

Sychev V.V.,

HSE University, Moscow, Russia, vsychev@hse.ru

elibrary_id: 1210065 |

Article received: 2024.12.03 14:50. Accepted: 2025.08.07 14:50


DOI: 10.17976/jpps/2025.06.13
EDN: JUJFFY

Rubric: Theory and methodology of political studies

For citation:

Sychev V.V. Trust in political institutions in comparative perspective: the role of rational and psychological factors. – Polis. Political Studies. 2025. No. 6. https://doi.org/10.17976/jpps/2025.06.13. EDN: JUJFFY (In Russ.)

The study conducted with the support of the Fundamental Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University, Moscow).

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 7^th 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.

Keywords

political trust, political institutions, democratic and authoritarian regimes, perceived procedural efficiency, democratic values, psychological needs.

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