The Relation between Interpersonal and Institutional Trust in European Countries: Which Came First?
The Relation between Interpersonal and Institutional Trust in European Countries: Which Came First?

Summary/Abstract: Numerous studies into the links between interpersonal trust and confidence in state institutions havebeen conducted since Putnam made the study of trust popular in the early 1990s. As might be expected, bothinterpersonal and institutional trust tend to be strongly correlated at the individual and the aggregate countrylevel. However, there have been no attempts to determine whether (i) interpersonal trust results from trust inpolitical institutions, (ii) whether the reverse is the case—confidence in government is a precondition for thedevelopment of individual trust, or (iii) there are purely reciprocal associations between these attitudes that wouldappear empirically as a lack of causality. Using data from the European Social Survey 2010 we test these threepossibilities using a recursive model.

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