Trust is a blessing. As an ideal that leads us to believe that people who are
different from us are part of our moral community, trust makes us more willing to deal with
people who are different from ourselves and holds us to high standards of honesty and fairness.
Trust provides the foundation for a rule of law and for policies that benefit the less fortunate.
Corruption is a curse. It flouts rules of fairness and gives some people
advantages that others don’t have. Corrupt institutions cause people to lose faith in government.
It should hardly be surprising that where there are high levels of trust, there is
less corruption.
1
Across 51 countries, the simple correlation between trust and corruption is .711
(see Figure 1). The Nordic countries are the most trusting and the least corrupt. The countries
with the highest levels of corruption - Colombia, the Philippines, Turkey, and Brazil - have the
least trusting citizens.
So it seems that where trust in others is low and corruption is high, as in
former Communist countries, we can increase the level of trust by reducing corruption. So argues
Bo Rothstein (2001, 479, 491). Rothstein suggested that Russians could become more like
Swedes if they could reduce the level of corruption in their society, creating trust “from above”
1.
We measure trust by the “standard” interpersonal trust question (here from the World
Values Survey): “Generally speaking do you believe most people can be trusted or can’t you be
too careful in dealing with people?” Our measure of corruption is 1998 estimate by Transparency
International. We used the 1995-96 estimates from the World Values Survey when available, but
supplemented these data with the 1990-93 estimates when no third wave surveys were available.
See Uslaner (2002, ch. 8) for a more detailed discussion of the data sources. The Transparency
International estimates of corruption are derived from elite surveys of corruption; they are
available at
http://www.transparency.de/documents/cpi/index.html
. The relationship is weakened
somewhat when we control for log GNP per capita and the level of economic inequality (the Gini
index), but remains powerfully significant. For the 2001 rankings, see
http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2001/cpi2001.html
.
Convention